Naruto Odd short tale
by WOLF TITAN
Summary: So many from the mind of the wolf titan, learn what version Naruto could have what i figure and wasn't my top best but their something i found had potential, M' for most storys not all
1. The Raven

_**Well from the look of how i have im turning all my short storys and placing them on one file saving room and getting chances for people to look at my naruto short storys**_

The group if four walked down the dirt road they watched the day turn to night and as the younge blonde by the name of naruto looked over the group he felt the urge of going to the bushes he looked at the others and said to them.

"Guys can i have a few minutes i need to take care of some buissness!" there the pink haired girl rolled her eyes and looked back at the blonde kid and said almost in a form of a banshee.

"WELL HURRY UP WE CAN'T WAIT FOR EVER!" the small group comprised of two other people with them one of them being a young Hinata hyuuge her hair flowing in the cold breeze that eared around them Naruto looked at them and yelled out

"Fine i just need to-" he was interupted as he fell to the ground and triped on something hard and looked down to see what it was it was strange it seemed like a book but what was a book doing here? he picked it up and as he did he notice that under it was a hand a boney hand suddenly as Naruto looked to see it he gave a horrible blood curling scream that could be heard from all around them a mile away.

This brought everyone coming towers him they looked at him and the jonin Kakashi looked at him and said "Well thats good I thought you fell in."

"Whats that suppose to mean there no toilets kakashi-sensi?" naruto yelled out almost angrey kakashi gave him a blank stair and said "Why did you scream?" Naruto pointed his hand over to the hand and they simple looked at him with a blank stair they saw nothing and Sakura said

"What was that about there nothing there but a book what it give little naruto the shackes." This was something he ignored but Hinata gave her a dirty look from behind as she clenched her fist Kakashi picked the book up and read the cover he then said the name to the other so they could hear it as well,

"_THE RAVEN By Edgar Allen Poe."They gave him a confused look as naruto said_

_"What's the raven? it a book about a bird?"" kakashi didn't know what to say he never heard of a story like this and said_

_"Well lets settle down for the night we can take a look at this book maybe read it." they nodded and soon went to work. After about a hour of pitching the tent and their master readng a pervy book (not the raven you pervert its shackspere lol!)_ As they settle around a roaring fire they Kakashi open the Raven book and looked back at them and said

"There a warning."

"W-What d-d-do you mean a warning?" Hinata said stuttering as they all waited for his answer and then he showed then it said

_**"TO THOUGHT THAT READ THIS SHOULD BE WARN AFTER YOU READ THIS YOU MUST FEEL YOUR INNER HEART REVELNG YOUR TRUE HEART OR YOU'RE SOUL WILL BE NEVERMORE."**_

This gave them a shuttering feeling but then Naruto gave them a tuff look and saying to them

"Read im not afraid of anything!" Hinata looked scared but showed confident infront of Naruto and gave a nodd.

Kakashi gave them a simple nodd and and he slowly open the book again as they did they heard a earey sound of the wind consuming them slowly and Kakashi red out load.

**Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,**

**Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,**

**While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,**

**As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.**

**"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door,**

**Only this, and nothing more."**

.

"What's a volume of forgotten lore?" Sakura asked, and setting hia book down, Kakashi thought of how to explain.

"Well, the word 'volume' in this case is used to refer to books of this kind." she began, holding up her poetry book for example, which was volume one out of her collection. "Lore means knowledge, or a body of knowledge, in written form. Like…you know those scrolls Tsunade has in her libary for medican? They could be considered the lore of jutsu, understand?"

The pink haired girl nodded, before asking again…"So he was reading a book about…?" He was still confused, as the poem only mentioned 'forgotten lore', but not lore about _what_.

"I don't know." Kakashi finally confessed, a little embarrassed.

.

**Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,**

**And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.**

**Eagerly I wished the morrow; vainly I had tried to borrow**

**From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore.**

**For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore;**

**Nameless here forevermore.**

"What is december kakashi-sama?" Hinata asked wondering as he looked near the bottome of the page kakashi then said " it seem's to be a month signing the begining of winter."

Naruto looked at them and then asked "who do you think is Lenore?" this was somthing that had them wonder and there the cyclope countinued to read

Hinata looked more sad and nervous hearing this as she listen more

**And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain**

**Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before,**

**So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating**

**"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.**

**Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;**

**This it is, and nothing more."**

"He still hasn't answered the door yet?" Naruto snorted. "That's not very polite, to leave them waiting like that." he chastised sarcastically.

Kakashi eyed him curiously, not so much upset at the interruption as she was surprised to learn that he was actually listening to the story after all.

" I'm suprised you'r listening but be quiet there more and i think the two lady like to hear more of this they looked and saw sakura looking unimpressed and Hinata blank glazed as she was listening with a delight..

.

**Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,**

**"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;**

**But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,**

**And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,**

**That I was scarce was sure I heard you." Here I opened wide the door;**

**Darkness there and nothing more...**

"See he said he was sorry!" giving a happy expression and Naruto gave him a blank looked and then said with a bit of attittued

"You know what would have been scarier than nothing?" Naruto expressed while rolling his eyes. "Anything!"

"Naruto, if you cannot appreciate Kakashi story go, nobody is forcing you to stay and listen." Sakura scolded.

He was getting ready to leave and then he heard a simple voice coming from behind him, knowing it was hinata

Naruto." she called softly, and he turned to look at her just in time to catch the tail end of the hard glare she'd sent in the Banshee's direction, which already made him feel a hundred percent better. Then Hinata shifted her gaze back his way as she continued her plea with, "You can stay, if you _want _to. we won't force you to remain here and listen if you _don't_ want to, but if you _do _want to stay, then please…" she finished, "…stay?"

How could he say no to the hopeful look in those soft grey eyes? Sakura also seemed to genuinely regret her words at the Hyuuge's earlier glare, and sent him her own look of apology in that moment in addition to Hinata's pleading gaze

Plopping back down again, he wondered idly if they'd noticed that he'd moved himself a bit closer to the fire. As he watched it flicker fighting the wind with its might as the story countinued

.

.

**Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,**

**Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.**

**But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token,**

**And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore!"**

**This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!"**

**Merely this, and nothing more.**

.

"So Lenore is his dead wife?" Naruto asked quietly. Surprised once again, but managing not to show it, Hinata gave him a smile as he was learning more and then the silver haird man said "Apparently she is but this is getting strange agreed." They nodded but he countinued on for the thrill

.

**Then into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,**

**Soon I heard again a tapping somewhat louder than before.**

**"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice;**

**Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore.**

**Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore.**

**'Tis the wind and nothing more!"**

**.**

**Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,**

**In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore.**

**Not the least obeisance made he; not an instant stopped or stayed he;**

**But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door.**

**Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.**

**Perched, and sat, and nothing more.**

What's a 'bust of Pallas' that he has above his door?" he asked next.

they lookedat Kakashi looked and then looked near the bottom od the page and said

"Apperently Pallas was a deity in a anchent greek as it says she was known as Athena goddess of knowlege and battle." this gave Sakura a smile knowing that woman were greater then most men,

"So in other words, the raven sat itself upon the statue-head of some goddess he had anchored above his door." Naruto clarified.

"I guess so Naruto." then he looked

"Why didn't he just say it _that _way in the first place?" He said again and Hinata was the one to say this

"It sound more creepyer. Naruto-Kun." after he nodded and the man started to read more as the wind got more stronger.

**Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,**

**By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,**

**"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,**

**Ghastly, grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore.**

**Tell me what thy lordly name is on the night's Plutonian shore!"**

**Quoth the raven "Nevermore."**

"Wait a minute…" Naruto spoke up again, "The raven talks?" they nodded as "Interesting." sakura commented, while stroking her chin as though in heavy contemplation.

"What is a Plutonian shore?" Hinata asked this time.

Its say it down here again this person was perpared for us, Naruto started to think of the skelton hand

There again, the term is in reference to old time with a god, this time of the god Pluto, who is the ruler of the underworld." he explained. "The word Plutonian is in reference to anything pertaining to Pluto or the underworld itself, 'the night's Plutonian shore' symbolizing the nighttime gateway connecting the underworld to the world of the living, as he wonders whether the raven is a prophet having wandered from said nightly shore in order to seek him."

"So in answer to his question, is the raven's _name _'Nevermore'?" Sakuta asked, pointing out "Because he asked him what his name was."

"I dont think so lets get going on this its getting later." the oldest man said

.

.

**Much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,**

**Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore;**

**For we cannot help agreeing that no sublunary being**

**Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door -**

**Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,**

**With such name as "Nevermore."**

.

..

.

"See." Naruto boasted, "Even the human in the poem realized that 'Nevermore' wasn't really the bird's name."

.

..

.

**But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only**

**That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.**

**Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered -**

**Till I scarcely more than muttered "Other friends have flown before;**

**On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before."**

**Quoth the raven "Nevermore."**

.

.Naruto remained quiet as he heard that verse it felt a form of sadness as he realised that the woman is dead and he could never be with her it reminded him of how of how he is wanting to be with Sakura but knew that they couldn't be together she was inlove with another man they soon heard a bird crow that made Hinata jump into Naruto arm they looked at each other and blushed. Kakashi started to talk more ignoring the two young kid close to each other.

_._

_._

**Wondering at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,**

**"Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store,**

**Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster**

**Followed fast and followed faster so when hope he would adjure,**

**Stern despair returned, instead of the sweet hope he dared adjure.**

**That sad answer, "Never - nevermore.""**

**.**

**But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling,**

**Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door.**

**Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking**

**Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore -**

**What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore -**

**Meant in croaking "Nevermore."**

.

.

What does 'bird of yore' mean?" Sakura spoke up, once again breaking the rhythm that Kakashi had attempted to establish. _Should've seen that one coming_.

"Yore is an archaic term for long ago, or times past. Like Midoriko could be referred to as a ninja of yore."

"Yeah." Naruto chimed in, for once completely serious as he addressed the child. "So 'grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore' is basically just a more poetic way of saying 'creepy bird of eras gone before'."

Hinata was impressed that he remember that much she was agrreing then she notcie that they were still holding each other but she didn't say a thing as she felt him hold her with his lean arms.

.

.

.

**This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing**

**To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core.**

**This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining**

**On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er,**

**But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er,**

**She shall press, ah, nevermore!**

.

.

"He's sitting on Lenore's cushion?" Sakura questioned quietly to the man beside her.

Nodding, Naruto answered, "And only just realizing it, bringing back sad memories looking at the pink girl, no doubt."

The wind was dieing but before it was gone it started to retern but it was a little bit stronger moving sakura hair

.

.

**Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer**

**Swung by angels whose faint footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.**

**"Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he hath sent thee**

**Respite - respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore;**

**Let me quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"**

**Quoth the raven "Nevermore."**

The Ninja paused there without even being interrupted, having sensed Sakura's proverbial raised hand after that last verse. Sure enough, Kakashi snickered to himseld, his eyes were large with confusion, as he tried to wrap his brain around the foreign words.

"Let me guess." he spoke up softly, "Quaff this kind nepenthe?" she asked, quoting the line she was sure he'd had the most difficulty with.

Nodding, the woman asked her, "What does that mean?"

"The word nepenthe means a drink or drug, or the plant it's made from, often mentioned by writers as having the power to bring forth pleasurable forgetfulness, especially of sorrow." she explained.

"Like Tsunade Saki." Naruto whispered quietly, though not quietly enough

Kakashi nodded and started to reading faster,

.

.

**"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil!**

**Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,**

**Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -**

**On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -**

**Is there - is there balm in Gilead? Tell me, tell me, I implore!"**

**Quoth the raven "Nevermore."**

.

.

"Tempter?" SAkura voiced solely, her meaning clear.

"In this context, it refers to the Devil, used as a proper name; a specific deity of darkness, from another foreign faith. That what it also say down there."

"Gilead?"

"A holy land from that same religion."

"Quit interrupting him." Naruto snapped, before quickly growing quiet himself when he realized that he was supposed to be keeping up the pretense of _not caring _about the story but wanted to keep the girl in his arms. (who wouldn't)

.

**"Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil - prophet still, if bird or devil!**

**By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore -**

**Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,**

**It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore.**

**Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."**

**Quoth the raven "Nevermore."**

Aidenn, or Eden, is a place separated from the harshness of the world, created by God as a land of peaceful tranquility, that man, being wicked, was cast out from." Kakashi explained briefly of her own accord, to which Sakura snapped her hand shut, having opened his mouth to voice that very question.

"So upon his death, he shall still not be granted a chance to again see his loved one, even in such a holy place." Kakashi commented.

"How sad…" Hinata mumbled.

_Just as I shall be with Sakura 'nevermore'_. Naruto thought forlornly, before reminding himself that the girl before him _was _Sakurau's reincarnation. _Though Hinata mind me compared toSakura_, he reminded himself, realizing, _They really are two totally different people, not that that's a bad thing_.

.

.

.

**"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting.**

**"Get thee back into the tempest and the night's Plutonian shore!**

**Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!**

**Leave my loneliness unbroken! Quit the bust above my door!**

**Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"**

**Quoth the raven "Nevermore."**

**.**

**And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting**

**On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;**

**And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,**

**And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor,**

**And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor**

**Shall be lifted...nevermore!**

.

.

There Kakashi closed the book as he looked at the young team that gave him a eary look of fright the wind seemed to have dissapperred and they looked at him as they felt fear run over not even the kyuubi could make them more scared right there and Naruto put Hinata down and started to go on a walk and heard Sakura yell out "

"Run you big chicken go and hide under a rock!" before laughting Hinata was about to punch her when she desided to go and follow the young boy

They soon were in a diserted area away from the other and he was shaking and she looked into his blue eyes and said to him without a stutter

"Are you ok Naruto?"

Once he decided they were a decent distance toward her, he sat her down, backing himself away from her by a few feet as he desperately tried to gather his thoughts.

Hinata knew that when Narut ohad something he wanted to say, you couldn't rush him. He had to find the words on his own, or he might just huff and say to forget the whole thing. So she waited patiently, silently, for him to gather the courage to tell her whatever it was that he'd felt was so important that he had to carry her away in the middle of the night in order to do so.

Finally, it appeared as though he was ready.

"Hinata…" he started, and her eyes immediately snapped to his, assuring him that he had her full attention. "The guy…in that story…basically, he was miserable because his love was... gone!He didn't seem to be at an impasse, so she merely nodded, waiting for him to continue.

"I…know how he feels." he suddenly confessed, lowering his head, and she gasped.

Was he…was he opening up to her…about Sakura-Teme? She had wanted him to talk to her about his pain for so long, but she knew he believed that it was something he had to suffer through on his own., right? That raven, it…was like a reminder, taunting him, _haunting_ him…like his own misery was doing."

"How so?" Hinara dared to whisper.

"Because..." he said, raising his eyes to meet her own, "...he doesn't have somebody as wonderful as you to stay by his side."

Her eyes widened in surprise at his words, as she raised a hand to her heart in mild shock over hearing him admit to such a thing out loud.

"Naruto?"

"Hinara…" he continued, "That Story made me realize something. Do I really want to be miserable, like that guy, a victim to the specters of the darkness in my heart?"

The question seemed rhetorical, but she dared to comment, "Nobody deserves that."

"I used to think that I did." he answered. "You know…I've told you before…" he reminded, "Being with you…I've never felt happier, or more free. But I'm not supposed to _be _all cheerful and at peace."

"Says who?" she asked him softly, daring to bridge the gap between them. He didn't back away as she stopped mere inches before him, resting her hand over _his_ heart.

Suddenly they were closer till there lips meet and he felt a shock throught him his heart was punding and he blushed slightly it felt right it was as if his sould was being completed.

As they seaperated he said to her

"I was close to killing my self tonnight but..."

she was shocked waiting for what he was going to say,

"I…don't want to die. Not any longer."

Wrapping her own free arm around him in return, she hugged him to her as tightly as she could. "I don't want you to die, either. You deserve to live, Naruto."

"What make me so special Hinata what is that?"

She raised her head, her eyes meeting his own, surprised by the look of nervousness she found there. She couldn't get the words out but he then said what she wanted to say to him.

"Hinata…I…I know you love me…but would you…_could _you…love me _enough_…that you'd…that you'd stay with me? After everything is over? I know you have a life in your own time. Hell, you have a _family _at home. You don't deserve to get pulled away from everything you've ever known, and I realize I'm the biggest asshole in the world for even-"

The kiss that silenced him caught the hanyou completely by surprise, but it didn't take Narutolong at all to reciprocate, as he closed his eyes, returning her kiss wholeheartedly.

"Of course I'll stay with you, you big dummy.." she breathed after they pulled apart for some much needed air.

"Hinata…" he murmured, hugging her tightly once more. "I…I _do _love you, just so you know. You aren't some second choice, you're…salvation."

"I love you too." she murmured, "I've loved you for so long."

Just then, a fluttering overhead caught both of their attentions, as they gazed upward, their eyes widening in eerie recognition of the raven perched overhead on a nearby tree branch.

Many cultures believed ravens to be messengers of the underworld, but it was honestly something that Naruto had never given a second thought about, at least before hearing her poem.

Then suddenly a giant horrifying Raven that was looking straight at Naruto looking deep in his soul and Naruto Gave it a great strength

"Be gone foul bird." he told the bird after a moment. "You can tell your master I've no misery to feed upon." Glancing down with a rare smile at the woman in his arms, he added, "I shall be lonely, nevermore."

They looked as the bird left them and they slowly return to camp and as they got there they looked to see their sensi was over Sakura giving her mouth to mouth she had a look of fright as she layed there and after a couple of seconds he felt her pulse and said the the two

"She's Dead." they looked at her wondering who or what killed her but they knew what from the story and Naruto looked to see in the corner of his eye the Raven and he knew that Sakura very soul, would never flicker, never prosper in this dismal land and shall remain her... evermore.

_**So how was that well im glad you liked it if you did if you want to read my other story look on my page review as much as yu want and rememebr Nevermore says I.**_


	2. 1408

Title: 1408  
Category: Anime/Manga » Naruto  
Author: WOLF TITAN  
Language: English, Rating: Rated: M  
Genre: Horror/General  
Published: 02-15-14, Updated: 02-15-14  
Chapters: 1, Words: 14,498  
Chapter 1: Chapter 1  
1408 (Naruto Version)

by Wolf Titan, Hey this is me and from what you see you know the movie 1408 by stephen king well I took the time wrote the short story from memory and here it is haha read and enjoy.

Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi was still in the revolving door when he saw Sasuke, the manager of the Hotel Sharingan, sitting in one of the overstuffed lobby chairs. Naruto's heart sank. Maybe I should have brought the lawyer along again, after all, he thought. Well, too late now. And even if Sasuke had decided to throw up another roadblock or two between Naruto and room 1408, that wasn't all bad; there were compensations.

Sasuke was crossing the room with one pudgy hand held out as Naruto left the revolving door. The Sharingan was on Sixty-first Street, around the corner from Fifth Avenue, small but smart. A man and a woman dressed in evening clothes passed Naruto as he reached for Sasuke's hand, switching his small overnight case to his left hand in order to do it. The woman was blond, dressed in black, of course, and the light, flowery smell of her perfume seemed to summarize Konah. On the mezzanine level, someone was playing "Night and Day" in the bar, as if to underline the summary.

"Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi. Good evening."

"Mr. Sasuke. Is there a problem?"

Sasuke looked pained. For a moment he glanced around the small, smart lobby, as if for help. At the concierge's stand, a man was discussing theater tickets with his wife while the concierge himself watched them with a small, patient smile. At the front desk, a man with the rumpled look one only got after long hours in Business Class was discussing his reservation with a woman in a smart black suit that could itself have doubled for evening wear. It was business as usual at the Hotel Sharingan. There was help for everyone except poor Mr. Sasuke, who had fallen into the writer's clutches.

"Mr. Sasuke?" Naruto repeated.

"Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi... could I speak to you for a moment in my office?"

Well, and why not? It would help the section on room 1408, add to the ominous tone the readers of his books seemed to crave, and that wasn't all. Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi hadn't been sure until now, in spite of all the backing and filling; now he was. Sasuke was really afraid of room 1408, and of what might happen to Naruto there tonight.

"Of course, Mr. Sasuke."

Sasuke, the good host, reached for Naruto's bag. "Allow me."

"I'm fine with it," Naruto said. "Nothing but a change of clothes and a toothbrush."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes," Naruto said. "I'm already wearing my lucky Hawaiian shirt." He smiled. "It's the one with the ghost repellent."

Sasuke didn't smile back. He sighed instead, a little round man in a dark cutaway coat and a neatly knotted tie. "Very good, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi. Follow me."

The hotel manager had seemed tentative in the lobby, almost beaten. In his oak-paneled office, with the pictures of the hotel on the walls (the Sharingan had opened in 19190- Naruto might publish without the benefit of reviews in the journals or the big-city papers, but he did his research), Sasuke seemed to gain assurance again. There was a Persian carpet on the floor. Two standing lamps cast a mild yellow light. A desk-lamp with a green lozenge-shaped shade stood on the desk, next to a humidor. And next to the humidor were Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi's last three books. Paperback editions, of course; there had been no hardbacks. Mine host has been doing a little research of his own, Naruto thought.

Naruto sat down in front of the desk. He expected Sasuke to sit behind the desk, but Sasuke surprised him. He took the chair beside Naruto's, crossed his legs, then leaned forward over his tidy little belly to touch the humidor.

"Cigar, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi?"

"No, thank you. I don't smoke."

Sasuke's eyes shifted to the cigarette behind Naruto's right ear- parked on a jaunty jut the way an old-time wisecracking reporter might have parked his next smoke just below the PRESS tag stuck in the band of his fedora. The cigarette had become so much a part of him that for a moment Naruto honestly didn't know what Sasuke was looking at. Then he laughed, took it down, looked at it himself, and looked back at Sasuke.

"Haven't had a one in nine years," he said. "Had an older brother who died of lung cancer. I quit after he died. The cigarette behind the ear..." He shrugged. "Part affectation, part superstition, I guess. Like the Hawaiian shirt. Or the cigarettes you sometimes see on people's desks or walls, mounted in a little box with a sign saying BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. Is 1408 a smoking room, Mr. Sasuke? Just in case nuclear war breaks out?"

"As a matter of fact, it is."

"Well," Naruto said heartily, "that's one less worry in the watches of the night."

Mr. Sasuke sighed again, but this sigh didn't have the disconsolate quality of his lobby-sigh. Yes, it was the office, Naruto reckoned. Sasuke's office, his special place. Even this afternoon, when Naruto had come accompanied by Jiryaya, the lawyer, Sasuke had seemed less flustered once they were in here. And why not? Where else could you feel in charge, if not in your special place? Sasuke's office was a room with good pictures on the walls, a good rug on the floor, and good cigars in the humidor. A lot of managers had no doubt conducted a lot of business in here since 110; in its own way it was as Konah as the blond in her black off-the-shoulder dress, her smell of perfume and her unarticulated promise of sleek Konah sex in the small hours of the morning.

"You still don't think I can talk you out of this idea of yours, do you?" Sasuke asked.

"I know you can't," Naruto said, replacing the cigarette behind his ear. He didn't slick his hair back with Vitalis or Wildroot Cream Oil, as those colorful fedora-wearing scribblers of yore had, but he still changed the cigarette every day, just as he changed his underwear. You sweat back there behind your ears; if he examined the cigarette at the end of the day before throwing its unsmoked deadly length into the toilet, Naruto could see the faint yellow-orange residue of that sweat on the thin white paper. It did not increase the temptation to light up. How he had smoked for almost twenty years-thirty butts a day, sometimes forty-was now beyond him. Why he had done it was an even better question.

Sasuke picked up the little stack of paperbacks from the blotter. "I sincerely hope you're wrong."

Naruto ran open the zipper on the side pocket of his overnight bag. He brought out a Sony minicorder. "Would you mind if I taped our conversation, Mr. Sasuke?"

Sasuke waved a hand. Naruto pushed RECORD and the little red light came on. The reels began to turn.

Sasuke, meanwhile, was shuffling slowly through the stack of books, reading the titles. As always when he saw his books in someone else's hands, Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi felt the oddest mix of emotions: pride, unease, amusement, defiance, and shame. He had no business feeling ashamed of them, they had kept him nicely over these last five years, and he didn't have to share any of the profits with a packager ("book-whores" was what his agent called them, perhaps partly in envy), because he had come up with the concept himself. Although after the first book had sold so well, only a moron could have missed the concept. What was there to do after Frankenstein but Bride of Frankenstein?

Still, he had gone to Iowa. He had studied with Jane Smiley. He had once been on a panel with Stanley Elkin. He had once aspired (absolutely no one in his current circle of friends and acquaintances had any least inkling of this) to be published as a Yale Younger Poet. And, when the hotel manager began speaking the titles aloud, Naruto found himself wishing he hadn't challenged Sasuke with the recorder. Later he would listen to Sasuke's measured tones and imagine he heard contempt in them. He touched the cigarette behind his ear without being aware of it.

"Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Houses," Sasuke read. "Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Graveyards. Ten Nights in Ten Haunted Castles." He looked up at Naruto with a faint smile at the corners of his mouth. "Got to Suna on that one. Not to mention the Rock villiage. And all tax-deductible, correct? Hauntings are, after all, your business."

"Do you have a point?"

"You're sensitive about these, aren't you?" Sasuke asked.

"Sensitive, yes. Vulnerable, no. If you're hoping to persuade me out of your hotel by critiquing my books-"

"No, not at all. I was curious, that's all. I sent Marcel-he's the concierge on days-out to get them two days ago, when you first appeared with your... request."

"It was a demand, not a request. Still is. You heard Mr. Jiryaya; Konah State law-not to mention two federal civil rights laws-forbids you to deny me a specific room, if I request that specific room and the room is vacant. And 1408 is vacant. 1408 is always vacant these days."

But Mr. Sasuke was not to be diverted from the subject of Naruto's last three books- Konah Times bestsellers, all-just yet. He simply shuffled through them a third time. The mellow lamplight reflected off their shiny covers. Purple sold scary books better than any other color, Naruto had been told.

"I didn't get a chance to dip into these until earlier this evening," Sasuke said. "I've been quite busy. I usually am. The Sharingan is small by Konah standards, but we run at ninety per cent occupancy and usually a problem comes through the front door with every guest."

"Like me."

Sasuke smiled a little. "I'd say you're a bit of a special problem, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi. You and your Mr. Jiryaya and all your threats."

Naruto felt nettled all over again. He had made no threats, unless Jiryaya himself was a threat. And he had been forced to use the lawyer, as a man might be forced to use a crowbar on a rusty lockbox which would no longer accept the key.

The lockbox isn't yours, a voice inside told him, but the laws of the state and the country said differently. The laws said that room 1408 in the Hotel Sharingan was his if he wanted it, and as long as no one else had it first.

He became aware that Sasuke was watching him, still with that faint smile. As if he had been following Naruto's interior dialogue almost word for word. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and Naruto was finding this an unexpectedly uncomfortable meeting. It felt as if he had been on the defensive ever since he'd taken out the minicorder (which actually was intimidating) and turned it on.

"If any of this has a point, Mr. Sasuke, I'm afraid I lost sight of it a turn or two back. And I've had a long day. If our wrangle over room 1408 is really over, I'd like to go on upstairs and-"

"I read one... uh, what would you call them? Essays? Tales?"

Bill-payers was what Naruto called them, but he didn't intend to say that with the tape running. Not even though it was his tape.

"Story," Sasuke decided. "I read one story from each book. The one about the Rilsby house in rainvillage from your Haunted Houses book-"

"Ah, yes. The axe murders." The fellow who had chopped up all six members of the gato mob family had never been caught.

"Exactly so. And the one about the night you spent camped out on the graves of the lovers in village hidden in the snow, who committed suicide-the ones people keep claiming to see around Sitka-and the account of your night in Gartsby Castle. That was actually quite amusing. I was surprised."

Naruto's ear was carefully tuned to catch the undernotes of contempt in even the blandest comments about his Ten Nights books, and he had no doubt that he sometimes heard contempt that wasn't there-few creatures on earth are so paranoid as the writer who believes, deep in his heart, that he is slumming, Naruto had discovered-but he didn't believe there was any contempt here.

"Thank you," he said. "I guess." He glanced down at his minicorder. Usually its little red eye seemed to be watching the other guy, daring him to say the wrong thing. This evening it seemed to be looking at Naruto himself.

"Oh yes, I meant it as a compliment." Sasuke tapped the books. "I expect to finish these... but for the writing. It's the writing I like. I was surprised to find myself laughing at your quite unsupernatural adventures in Gartsby Castle, and I was surprised to find you as good as you are. As subtle as you are. I expected more hack and slash."

Naruto steeled himself for what would almost certainly come next, Sasuke's variation of What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this. Sasuke the urbane hotelier, host to blond women who wore black dresses out into the night, hirer of weedy, retiring men who ware tuxes and tinkled old standards like "Night and Day" in the hotel bar. Sasuke who probably read Proust on his nights off.

"But they are disturbing, too, these books. If I hadn't looked at them, I don't think I would have bothered waiting for you this evening. Once I saw that lawyer with his briefcase, I knew you meant to stay in the goddamned room, and that nothing I could say was apt to dissuade you. But the books..."

Naruto reached out and snapped off the minicorder-that little red eye was starting to give him the willies. "Do you want to know why I'm bottom-feeding? Is that it?"

"I assume you do it for the money," Sasuke said mildly. "And you're feeding a long way from the bottom, at least in my estimation... although it's interesting that you would jump so nimbly to such a conclusion."

Naruto felt warmth rising in his cheeks. No, this wasn't going the way he had expected at all; he had never snapped his recorder off in the middle of a conversation. But Sasuke wasn't what he had seemed. I was led astray by his hands, Naruto thought. Those pudgy little hotel manager's hands with their neat white crescents of manicured nail.

"What concerned me-what frightened me-is that I found myself reading the work of an intelligent, talented man who doesn't believe one single thing he has written."

That wasn't exactly true, Naruto thought. He'd written perhaps two dozen stories he believed in, had actually published a few. He'd written reams of poetry he believed in during his first eighteen months in Konah, when he had starved on the payroll of The Village Voice. But did he believe that the headless ghost of Kiba Inuzuka walked his deserted Suna farmhouse by moonlight? No. He had spent the night in that farmhouse, camped out on the dirty linoleum hills of the kitchen floor, and had seen nothing scarier than two mice trundling along the baseboard. He had spent a hot summer night in the ruins of the Transylvanian castle where Vlad Tepes supposedly still held court; the only vampires to actually show up had been a fog of European mosquitoes. During the night camped out by the grave of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, a white, blood-streaked figure waving a knife had come at him out of the two o'clock darkness, but the giggles of the apparition's friends had given him away, and Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi hadn't been terribly impressed, anyway; he knew a teenage ghost waving a rubber knife when he saw one. But he had no intention of telling nay of this to Sasuke. He couldn't afford-

Except he could. The minicorder (a mistake from the getgo, he now understood) was stowed away again, and this meeting was about as off-the-record as you could get. Also, he had come to admire Sasuke in a weird way. And when you admired a man, you wanted to tell him the truth.

"No," he said, "I don't believe in ghoulies and ghosties and long leggety beasties. I think it's good there are no such things, because I don't believe there's any good Lord that can protect us from them, either. That's what I believe, but I've kept an open mind from the very start. I may never win the Pulitzer Prize for investigating The Barking Ghost in Mount Hope Cemetery, but I would have written fairly about him if he had shown up."

Sasuke said something, only a single word, but too low for Naruto to make it out.

"I beg pardon?"

"I said no." Sasuke looked at him almost apologetically.

Naruto sighed. Sasuke thought he was a liar. When you got to that point, the only choices were to put up your dukes or disengage totally from the discussion. "Why don't we leave this for another day, Mr. Sasuke? I'll just go on upstairs and brush my teeth. Perhaps I'll see Itachi Uchiha materialize behind me in the bathroom mirror."

Naruto started to get out of his chair, and Sasuke put out one of his pudgy, carefully manicured hands to stop him. "I'm not calling you a liar," he said, "but, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi, you don't believe. Ghosts rarely appear to those who don't believe in them, and when they do, they are rarely seen. Why, Shino bugs could have bowled his severed head all the way down the front hall of his home, and you wouldn't have heard a thing!"

Naruto stood up, then bent to grab his overnight case. "If that's so, I won't have anything to worry about in room 1408, will I?"

"But you will," Sasuke said. "You will. Because there are no ghosts in room 1408 and never have been. There's something in there-I've felt it myself-but it's not a spirit presence. In an abandoned house or an old castle keep, your unbelief may serve you as protection. In room 1408, it will only render you more vulnerable. Don't do it, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi. That's why I waited for you tonight, to ask you, beg you, not to do it. Of all the people on earth who don't belong in that room, the man who wrote those cheerful, exploitative true-ghost books leads the list."

Naruto heard this and didn't hear it at the same time. And you turned off your tape recorder! he was raving. He embarrasses me into turning off my tape recorder and then he turns into Boris Karloff hosting the All-Star Spook Weekend! Fuck it. I'll quote him anyway. If he doesn't like it, let him sue me.

All at once he was burning to get upstairs, not just so he could start getting his long night in a corner hotel room over with, but because he wanted to transcribe what Sasuke had just said while it was still fresh in his mind.

"Have a drink, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi."

"No, I really-"

Mr. Sasuke reached into his coat pocket and brought out a key on a long brass paddle. The brass looked old and scratched and tarnished. Embossed on it were the numbers 1408. "Please," Sasuke said. "Humor me. You give me ten more minutes of your time-long enough to consume a short Scotch-and I'll hand you this key. I would give almost anything to be able to change your mind, but I like to think I can recognize the inevitable when I see it."

"You still use actual keys here?" Naruto asked. "That's sort of a nice touch. Antiquey."

"The Sharingan went to a MagCard system in 1979, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi, the year I took the job as manager. 1408 is the only room in the house that still opens with a key. There was no need to put a MagCard lock on its door, because there's never anyone inside; the room was last occupied by a paying guest in 1978."

"You're shitting me!" Naruto sat down again, and unlimbered his minicorder again. He pushed the RECORD button and said, "House manager Sasuke claims 1408 not rented to a paying guest in over twenty years."

"It is just as well that 1408 has never needed a MagCard lock on its door, because I am completely positive the device wouldn't work. Digital wristwatches don't work in room 1408. Sometimes they run backward, sometimes they simply go out, but you can't tell time with one. Not in room 1408, you can't. The same is true of pocket calculators and cellphones. If you're wearing a beeper, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi, I advise you to turn it off, because once you're in room 1408, it will start beeping at will." He paused. "And turning it off isn't guaranteed to work, either; it may turn itself back on. The only sure cure is to pull the batteries." He pushed the STOP button on the minicorder without examining the buttons; Naruto supposed he used a similar model for dictating memos. "Actually, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi, the only sure cure is to stay the hell out of that room."

"I can't do that," Naruto said, taking his minicorder back and stowing it once more, "but I think I can take time for that drink."

While Sasuke poured from the fumed-oak bar beneath an oil painting of Fifth Avenue at the turn of the century, Naruto asked him how, if the room had been continuously unoccupied since 1978, Sasuke knew that high-tech gadgets didn't work inside.

"I didn't intend to give you the impression that no one had set foot through the door since 1978," Sasuke replied. "For one thing, there are maids in once a month to give the place a light turn. That means-"

Naruto, who had been working on Ten Haunted Hotel Rooms for about four months at that point, said: "I know what it means." A light turn in an unoccupied room would include opening the windows to change the air, dusting, enough Ty-D-Bowl in the can to turn the water briefly bowl, a change of the towels. Probably not the bed-linen, not on a light turn. He wondered if he should have brought his sleeping-bag.

Crossing the Persian from the bar with their drinks in his hands, Sasuke seemed to read Naruto's thought on his face. "The sheets were changed this very afternoon, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi."

"Why don't you drop that? Call me Naruto."

"I don't think I'd be comfortable with that," Sasuke said, handing Naruto his drink. "Here's to you."

"And you." Naruto lifted his glass, meaning to click it against Sasuke's, but Sasuke pulled his back.

"No, to you, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi. I insist. Tonight we should both drink to you. You'll need it."

Naruto sighed, clinked the rim of his glass against the rim of Sasuke's, and said: "To me. You would have been right at home in a horror movie, Mr. Sasuke. You could have played the gloomy old butler who tries to warn the young married couple way from Castle Doom."

Sasuke sat down. "It's a part I haven't had to play often, thank God. Room 1408 isn't listed on any of the websites dealing with paranormal locations or psychic hotspots-"

That'll change after my book, Naruto thought, sipping his drink.

"-and there are no ghost-tours with stops at the Hotel Sharingan, although they do tour through the Byakugan, the Rinnigan, and the Senju. We have kept 1408 as quiet as possible... although, of course, the history has always been there for a researcher who is both lucky and tenacious."

Naruto allowed himself a small smile.

"Veronique changed the sheets," Sasuke said. "I accompanied her. You should feel flattered, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi; it's almost like having your night's linen put on by royalty. Veronique and her sister came to the Sharingan as chambermaids in 1971 or '72. Vee, as we call her, is the Hotel Sharingan's longest-running employee, with at least six years' seniority over me. She has since risen to head housekeeper. I'd guess she hadn't changed a sheet in six years before today, but she used to do all the turns in 1408-she and her sister-until about 1992. Veronique and Celeste were twins, and the bond between them seemed to make them... how shall I put it? Not immune to 1408, but its equal... at least for the short periods of time needed to give a room a light turn."

"You're not going to tell me this Veronique's sister died in the room, are you?"

"No, not at all," Sasuke said. "She left service here around 1988, suffering from ill health. But I don't rule out the idea that 1408 may have played a part in her worsening mental and physical condition."

"We seem to have built a rapport here, Mr. Sasuke. I hope I don't snap it by telling you I find that ridiculous."

Sasuke laughed. "So hardheaded for a student of the airy world."

"I owe it to my readers," Naruto said blandly.

"I suppose I simply could have left 1408 as it is anyway during most of its days and nights," the hotel manager mused. "Door locked, lights off, shades drawn to keep the sun from fading the carpet, coverlet pulled up, doorknob breakfast menu on the bed... but I can't bear to think of the air getting stuffy and old, like the air in an attic. Can't bear to think of the dust piling up until it's thick and fluffy. What does that make me, persnickety or downright obsessive?"

"It makes you a hotel manager."

"I suppose. In any case, Vee and Cee turned that room-very quick, just in and out-until Cee retired and Vee got her first big promotion. After that, I got other maids to do it in pairs, always picking ones who got on well with each other-"

"Hoping for that bond to withstand the bogies?"

"Hoping for that bond, yes. And you can make fun of the room 1408 bogies as much as you want, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi, but you'll feel them almost at once, of that I'm confident. Whatever there is in that room, it's not shy."

"On many occasions-all that I could manage-I went with the maids, to supervise them." He paused, the added, almost reluctantly, "To pull them out, I suppose, if anything really awful started to happen. Nothing ever did. There were several who had weeping fits, one who had a laughing fit-I don't know why someone laughing out of control should be more frightening than someone sobbing, but it is-and a number who fainted. Nothing too terrible, however. I had time enough over the years to make a few primitive experiments-beepers and cell-phones and such-but nothing too terrible. Thank God." He paused again, then added in a queer, flat tone: "One of them went blind."

"What?"

"She went blind. Sakura Harou, that was. She was dusting the top of the television, and all at once she began to scream. I asked her what was wrong. She dropped her dustrag and put her hands over her eyes and screamed that she was blind... but that she could see the most awful colors. They went away almost as soon as I got her out through the door, and by the time I got her down the hallway to the elevator, her sight had begun to come back."

"You're telling me all this just to scare me, Mr. Sasuke, aren't you? To scare me off."

"Indeed I am not. You know the history of the room, beginning with the suicide of its first occupant."

Naruto did. Kevin O'Malley, a sewing machine salesman, had taken his life on October 13, 1910, a leaper who had left a wife and seven children behind.

"Five men and one woman have jumped from that room's single window, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi. Three women and one man have overdosed with pills in that room, two found in bed, two found in the bathroom, one in the tub and one sitting slumped on the toilet. A man hanged himself in the closet in 1970-"

"Shikamau Nara," Naruto said. "That one was probably accidental... erotic asphyxia."

"Perhaps. There was also Randolph Hyde, who slit his wrists, and then cut off his genitals for good measure while he was bleeding to death. That one wasn't erotic asphyxiation. The point is, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi, that if you can't be swayed from your intention by a record of twelve suicides in sixty-eight years, I doubt if the gasps and fibrillations of a few chambermaids will stop you."

Gasps and fibrillations, that's nice, Naruto thought, and wondered if he could steal it for the book.

"Few of the pairs who have turned 1408 over the years care to go back more than a few times," Sasuke said, and finished his drink in a tidy little gulp.

"Except for the French twins."

"Tee and Lee, that's true." Sasuke nodded.

Naruto didn't care much about the maids and their... what had Sasuke called them? Their gasps and fibrillations. He did feel mildly rankled by Sasuke's enumeration of the suicides... as if Naruto was so thick he had missed, not the fact of them, but their import. Except, really, there was no import. Both Minata nama and Tsunade Senju had vice presidents named Johnson; the names Lincoln and Kennedy had seven letters; both Minato and Tsunade had been elected in years ending in 60. What did all of these coincidences prove? Not a damned thing.

"The suicides will make a wonderful segment for my book," Naruto said, "but since the tape recorder is off, I can tell you they amount to what a statistician resource of mine calls 'the cluster effect.' "

"Charles Dickens called it 'the potato effect,' " Sasuke said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"When Jacob Marley's ghost first speaks to Scrooge, Scrooge tells him he could be nothing but a blob of mustard or a bit of underdone potato."

"Is that supposed to be funny?" Naruto asked, a trifle coldly.

"Nothing about this strikes me as funny, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi. Nothing at all. Listen very closely, please. Lee's Brother, Tee, died of a heart attack. At that point, she was suffering mid-stage Alzheimer's, a disease which struck her very early in life."

"Yet her sister is fine and well, according to what you said earlier. An American success story, in fact. As you are yourself, Mr. Sasuke, from the look of you. Yet you've been in and out of room 1408 how many times? A hundred? Two hundred?"

"For very short periods of time," Sasuke said. "It's perhaps like entering a room filled with poison gas. If one holds one's breath, one may be all right. I see you don't like that comparison. You no doubt find it overwrought, perhaps ridiculous. Yet I believe it's a good one."

He steepled his fingers beneath his chin.

"It's also possible that some people react more quickly and more violently to whatever lives in that room, just as some people who go scuba-diving are more prone to the bends than others. Over the Sharingan's near-century of operation, the hotel staff has grown ever more aware that 1408 is a poisoned room. It has become part of the house history, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi. No one talks about it, just as no one mentions the fact that here, as in most hotels, the fourteenth floor is actually the thirteenth... but they know it. If all the facts and records pertaining to that room were available, they would tell an amazing story... one more uncomfortable than your readers might enjoy. I should guess, for example, that every hotel in Konah has had its suicides, but I would be willing to wager my life that only in the Sharingan have there been a dozen of them in a single room. And leaving Celeste Romandeau aside, what about the natural deaths in 1408? The so-called natural deaths?"

"How many have there been?" The idea of so-called natural deaths in 1408 had never occurred to him.

"Thirty," Sasuke replied. "Thirty, at least. Thirty that I know of."

"You're lying!" The words were out of his mouth before he could call them back.

"No, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi, I assure you I'm not. Did you really think that we keep that room empty just out of some vapid old wives' superstition or ridiculous Konah tradition... the idea, maybe, that every fine old hotel should have at least one unquiet spirit, clanking around in the Suite of Invisible Chains?"

Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi realized that just such an idea-not articulated but there, just the same-had indeed been hanging around his new Ten Nights book. To hear Sasuke scoff at it in the irritated tones of a scientist scoffing at a bruja-waving native did nothing to soothe his chagrin.

"We have our superstitions and traditions in the hotel trade, but we don't let them get in the way of our business, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi. There's an old saying in the Midwest, where I broke into the business: 'There are no drafty rooms when the cattlemen are in town.' If we have empties, we fill them. The only exception to that rule I have ever made-and the only talk like this I have ever had-is on account of room 1408, a room on the thirteenth floor whose very numerals add up to thirteen."

Sasuke looked levelly at Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi.

"It is a room not only of suicides but of strokes and heart attacks and epileptic seizures. One man who stayed in that room-this was in 1973-apparently drowned in a bowl of soup. You would undoubtedly call that ridiculous, but I spoke to the man who was head of hotel security at the time, and he saw the death certificate. The power of whatever inhabits that room seems to be less around midday, which is when the room-turns always occur, and yet I know of several maids who have turned that room who now suffer from heart problems, emphysema, diabetes. There was a heating problem on that floor three years ago, and Mr. Neal, the head maintenance engineer at the time, had to go into several of the rooms to check the heating units. 1408 was one of them. He seemed fine then-both in the room and later on-but he died the following afternoon of a massive cerebral hemorrhage."

"Coincidence," Naruto said. Yet he could not deny that Sasuke was good. Had the man been a camp counselor, he would have scared ninety per cent of the kiddies back home after the first round of campfire ghost stories.

"Coincidence," Sasuke repeated softly, not quite contemptuously. He held out the old-fashioned key on its old-fashioned brass paddle. "How is your own heart, Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi? Not to mention your blood-pressure and psychological condition?"

Naruto found it took an actual, conscious effort to lift his hand... but once he got it moving, it was fine. It rose to the key without even the minutest trembling at the fingertips, so far as he could see.

"All fine," he said, grasping the worn brass paddle. "Besides, I'm wearing my lucky Hawaiian shirt."

Sasuke insisted on accompanying Naruto to the fourteenth floor in the elevator, and Naruto did not demur. He was interested to see that, once they were out of the manager's office and walking down the hall which led to the elevators, the man reverted to his less consequential self; he became once again poor Mr. Sasuke, the flunky who had fallen into the writer's clutches.

A man in a tux-Naruto guessed he was either the restaurant manager or the maitre d'-stopped them, offered Sasuke a thin sheaf of papers, and murmured to him in French. Sasuke murmured back, nodding, and quickly scribbled his signature on the sheets. The fellow in the bar was now playing "Autumn in Konah." From this distance, it had an echoey sound, like music heard in a dream.

The man in the tuxedo said "Merci bien" and went on his way. Naruto and the hotel manager went on theirs. Sasuke again asked if he could carry Naruto's little valise, and Naruto again refused. In the elevator, Naruto found his eyes drawn to the neat triple row of buttons. Everything was where it should have been, there were no gaps... and yet, if you looked more closely, you saw that there was. The button marked 12 was followed by the one marked 14. As if, Naruto thought, they could make the number nonexistent by omitting it from the control-panel of an elevator. Foolishness... and yet Sasuke was right; it was done all over the world.

As the car rose, Naruto said, "I'm curious about something. Why didn't you simply create a fictional resident for room 1408, if it scares you all as badly as you say it does? For that matter, Mr. Sasuke, why not declare it as your own residence?"

"I suppose I was afraid I would be accused of fraud, if not by the people responsible for enforcing state and federal civil rights statues-hotel people feel about civil rights laws as many of your readers probably feel about clanking chains in the night-then by my bosses, if they got wind of it. If I couldn't persuade you to stay out of 1408, I doubt that I would have had much more luck in convincing the Stanley Corporation's board of directors that I took a perfectly good room off the market because I was afraid that spooks cause the occasional traveling salesman to jump out the window and splatter himself all over Sixty-first Street."

Naruto found this the most disturbing thing Sasuke had said yet. Because he's not trying to convince me anymore, he thought. Whatever salesmanship powers he had in this office-maybe it's some vibe that comes up from the Persian rug-he loses it out here. Competency, yes, you could see that when he was signing the maitre d's chits, but not salesmanship. Not personal magnetism. Not out here. But he believes it. He believes it all.

Above the door, the illuminated 12 went out and the 14 came on. The elevator stopped. The door slid open to reveal a perfectly ordinary hotel corridor with a red-and-gold carpet (most definitely not a Persian) and electric fixtures that looked like nineteenth-century gaslights.

"Here we are," Sasuke said. "Your floor. You'll pardon me if I leave you here. 1408 is to your left, at the end of the hall. Unless I absolutely have to, I don't go any closer than this."

Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi stepped out of the elevator on legs that seemed heavier than they should have. He turned back to Sasuke, a pudgy little man in a black coat and a carefully knotted wine-colored tie. Sasuke's manicured hands were clasped behind him now, and Naruto saw that the little man's face was as pale as cream. On his high, lineless forehead, drops of perspiration stood out.

"There's a telephone in the room, of course," Sasuke said. "You could try it, if you find yourself in trouble... but I doubt that it will work. Not if the room doesn't want it to."

Naruto thought of a light reply, something about how that would save him a room-service charge at least, but all at once his tongue seemed as heavy as his legs. It just lay there on the floor of his mouth.

Sasuke brought one hand out from behind his back, and Naruto saw it was trembling. "Mr. Uzumaki-Namakazi," he said. "Naruto. Don't do this. For God's sake-"

Before he could finish, the elevator door slid shut, cutting him off. Naruto stood where he was for a moment, in the perfect Konah hotel silence of what no one on the staff would admit was the thirteenth floor of the Hotel Sharingan, and thought of reaching out and pushing the elevator's call-button.

Except if he did that, Sasuke would win. And there would be a large, gaping hole where the best chapter of his new book should have been. The readers might not know that, his editor and his agent might not know it, Jiryaya the lawyer might not... but he would.

Instead of pushing the call-button, he reached up and touched the cigarette behind his ear-that old, distracted gesture he no longer knew he was making-and flicked the collar of his lucky shirt. Then he started down the hallway toward 1408, swinging his overnight case by his side.

II

The most interesting artifact left in the wake of Michael Uzumaki-Namakazi's brief stay (it lasted about seventy minutes) in room 1408 was the eleven minutes of recorded tape in his minicorder, which was charred a bit but not even close to destroyed. The fascinating thing about the narration was how little narration there was. And how odd it became.

The minicorder had been a present from his ex-wife, with whom he had remained friendly, five years before. On his first "case expedition" (the Rilsby farm in Kansas) he had taken it almost as an afterthought, along with five yellow legal pads and a leather case filled with sharpened pencils. By the time he reached the door of room 1408 in the Hotel Sharingan three books later, he came with a single pen and notebook, plus five fresh ninety-minute cassettes in addition to the one he had loaded into the machine before leaving his apartment.

He had discovered that narration served him better than note-taking; he was able to catch anecdotes, some of them pretty damned great, as they happened - the bats that had dive-bombed him in the supposedly haunted tower of Gartsby Castle, for instance. He had shrieked like a girl on her first trip through a carny haunted house. Friends hearing this were invariably amused.

The little tape recorder was more practical than written notes, too, especially when you were in a chilly New Brunswick graveyard and a squall of rain and wind collapsed your tent at three in the morning. You couldn't take very successful notes in such circumstances, but you could talk... which was what Naruto had done, gone on talking as he struggled out of the wet, flapping canvas of his tent, never losing sight of the minicorder's comforting red eye. Over the years and the "case expeditions," the Sony minicorder had become his friend. He had never recorded a first-hand account of a true supernatural event on the filament-thin ribbon of tape running between the reels, and that included the broken comments he made while in 1408, but it was probably not surprising that he had arrived at such feelings of affection for the gadget. Long-haul truckers come to love their Kenworths and Jimmy-Petes; writers treasure a certain pen or battered old typewriter; professional cleaning ladies are loath to give up the old Electrolux. Naruto had never had to stand up to an actual ghost or psychokinetic event with only the minicorder - his version of a cross and a bunch of garlic - to protect him, but it had been there on plenty of cold, uncomfortable nights. He was hardheaded, but that didn't make him inhuman.

His problems with 1408 started even before he got into the room.

The door was crooked.

Not by a lot, but it was crooked, all right, canted just the tiniest bit to the left. It made him think first of scary movies where the director tried to indicate mental distress in one of the characters by tipping the camera on the point-of-view shots. This association was followed by another one - the way doors looked when you were on a boat and the weather was a little heavy. Back and forth they went, right and left they went, tick and tock they went, until you started to feel a bit woozy in your head and stomach. Not that he felt that way himself, not at all, but -

Yes, I do. Just a little.

And he would say so, too, if only because of Sasuke's insinuation that his attitude made it impossible for him to be fair in the undoubtedly subjective field of spook journalism.

He bent over (aware that the slightly woozy feeling in his stomach left as soon as he was no longer looking at that subtly off-kilter door), unzipped the pocket on his overnighter, and took out his minicorder. He pushed RECORD as he straightened up, saw the little red eye go on, and opened his mouth to say, "The door of room 1408 offers it own unique greeting; it appears to have been set crooked, tipped slightly to the left."

He said The door, and that's all. If you listen to the tap, you can hear the words clearly, The door and then the click of the STOP button. Because the door wasn't crooked. It was perfectly straight. Naruto turned, looked at the door of 1409 across the hall, then back at the door of 1408. Both doors were the same, white with gold number-plaques and gold doorknobs. Both perfectly straight.

Naruto bent, picked up his overnight case with the hand holding the minicorder, moved the key in his other hand towards the lock, then stopped again.

The door was crooked again.

This time it tilted slightly to the right.

"This is ridiculous," Naruto murmured, but that woozy feeling had already started in his stomach again. It wasn't just like seasickness, it was seasickness. He had crossed to England on the QE2 a couple of years ago, and one night had been extremely rough. What Naruto remembered most clearly was lying on the bed in his stateroom, always on the verge of throwing up and never quite able to do it. And how the feeling of nauseated vertigo got worse if you looked at a doorway... or a table... or a chair... at how they would go back and forth... right and left... tick and tock...

This is Sasuke's fault, he thought. Exactly what he wants. He built you up for it, buddy. He set you up for it. Man, how he'd laugh if he could see you. How-

His thoughts broke off as he realized Sasuke very likely could see him. Naruto looked back down the corridor toward the elevator, barely noticing that the slightly whoopsy feeling in his stomach left the moment he stopped staring at the door. Above and to the left of the elevators, he saw what he had expected: a closed-circuit camera. One of the house dicks might be looking at it this very moment, and Naruto was willing to bet that Sasuke was right there with him, both of them grinning like apes. Teach him to come in here and start throwing his weight and his lawyer around, Sasuke says. Lookit him! the security man replies, grinning more widely than ever. White as a ghost himself, and he hasn't even touched the key to the lock yet. You got him, boss! Got him hook, line, and sinker!

Damned if you do, Naruto thought. I stayed in the Rilsby house, slept in the room where at least two of them were killed-and I did sleep, whether you believed it or not. I spent a night right next to Jeffrey Dahmer's grave and another two stones over from H.P. Lovecraft's; I brushed my teeth next to the tub where Sir David Smythe supposedly drowned both of his wives. I stopped being scared of campfire stories a long time ago. I'll be damned if you do!

He looked back at the door and the door was straight. He grunted, pushed the key into the lock, and turned it. The door opened. Naruto stepped in. The door did not swing slowly shut behind him as he felt for the light switch, leaving him in total darkness (besides, the lights of the apartment building next door shone through the window). He found the switch . When he flicked it, the over head light, enclosed in a collection of dangling crystal ornaments, came on. So did the standing lamp by the desk on the far side of the room.

The window was above this desk, so someone sitting there writing could pause in his work and look out on Sixty-first Street... or jump out on Sixty-first, if the urge so took him. Except-

Naruto set down his bag just inside the door, closed the door, and pushed RECORD again. The little red light went on.

"According to Sasuke, six people have jumped from the window I'm looking at," he said, "but I won't be taking any dives from the fourteenth-excuse me, the thirteenth- floor of the Hotel Sharingan tonight. There's an iron or steel mesh grille over the outside. Better safe than sorry. 1408 is what you'd call a junior suite, I guess. The room I'm in has two chairs, a sofa, a writing desk, a cabinet that probably contains the TV and maybe a minibar. Carpet on the floor is unremarkable-not a patch on Sasuke's believe me. Wallpaper, ditto. It... wait..."

At this point the listener hears another click on the tape as Naruto hits the STOP button again. All the scant narration on the tape has that same fragmentary quality, which is utterly unlike the other hundred and fifty or so tapes in his literary agent's possession. In addition, his voice grows steadily more distracted; it is not the voice of a man at work, but of a perplexed individual who has begun talking to himself without realizing it. The elliptical nature of the tapes and that growing verbal distraction combine to give most listeners a distinct feeling of unease. Many ask that the tape be turned off long before the end is reached. Mere words on a page cannot adequately convey a listener's growing conviction that he is hearing a man lose, if not his mind, then his hold on conventional reality, but even the flat words themselves suggest that something was happening.

What Naruto had noticed at that point were the pictures on the walls. There were three of them: a lady in twenties-style evening dress standing on a staircase, a sailing ship done in the fashion of Currier & Ives, and a still life of fruit, the latter painted with an unpleasant yellow-orange cast to the apples as well as the oranges and bananas. All three pictures were in glass frames and all three were crooked. He had been about to mention the crookedness on tape, but what was so unusual, so worthy of comment, about three off-kilter pictures? That a door should be crooked... well, that had a little of that old Cabinet of Dr. Caligari charm. But the door hadn't been crooked; his eyes had tricked him for a moment, that was all.

The lady on the stairs tilted left. So did the sailing ship, which showed bell-bottomed British tars lining the rail to watch a school of flying fish. The yellowish-orange fruit-to Naruto it looked like a bowl of fruit painted by the light of a suffocating equatorial sun, a Paul Bowles desert sun-tilted to the right. Although he was not ordinarily a fussy man, he circled the room, setting them straight. Looking at them crooked like that was making him feel a touch nauseated again. He wasn't entirely surprised, either. One grew susceptible to the feeling; he had discovered that on the QE 2. He had been told that if one persevered through that period of increased susceptibility, one usually adapted... "got your sealegs," some of the old hands still said. Naruto hadn't done enough sailing to get his sealegs, nor cared to. These days he stuck with his land legs, and if straightening the three pictures in the unremarkable sitting room of 1408 would settle his midsection, good for him.

There was dust on the glass covering the pictures. He trailed his fingers across the still life and left two parallel streaks. The dust had a greasy, slippery feel. Like silk just before it rots was what came into his mind, but he was damned if he was going to put that on tape, either. How was he supposed to know what silk felt like just before it rotted? It was a drunk's thought.

When the pictures were set to rights, he stepped back and surveyed them in turn: the evening-dressed lady by the door leading into the bedroom, the ship plying one of the seven seas to the left of the writing desk, and finally the nasty (and quite badly painted) fruit by the TV cabinet. Part of him expected that they would be crooked again, or fall crooked as he looked at them-that was the way things happened in movies like House on Haunted Hill and in old episodes of The Twilight Zone-but the pictures remained perfectly straight, as he had fixed them. Not, he told himself, that he would have found anything supernatural or paranormal in a return to their former crooked state; in his experience, reversion was the nature of things-people who had given up smoking (he touched the cigarette cocked behind his ear without being aware of it) wanted to go on smoking, and pictures that had been hanging crooked since Nixon was President wanted to go on hanging crooked. And they've been here a long time, no doubt about that, Naruto thought. If I lifted them away from the walls, I'd see lighter patches on the wallpaper. Or bugs squirming out, the way they do when you turn over a rock.

There was something both shocking and nasty about this idea; it came with a vivid image of blind white bugs oozing out of the pale and formerly protected wallpaper like living pus.

Naruto raised the minicorder, pushed RECORD, and said: "Sasuke has certainly started a train of thought in my head. Or a chain of thought, which is it? He set out to give me the heebie-jeebies, and he certainly succeeded. I don't mean..." Didn't mean what? To be racist? Was "heebie-jeebies" short for Hebrew jeebies? But that was ridiculous. That would be "Hebrew-jebrews," a phrase which was meaningless. It-

On the tape at this point, flat and perfectly articulated, Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi says: "I've got to get hold of myself. Right now." This is followed by another click as he shuts the tape off again.

He closed his eyes and took four long, measured breaths, holding each one in to a five-count before letting it out again. Nothing like this had ever happened to him-not in the supposedly haunted houses, the supposedly haunted graveyards, or the supposedly haunted castles. This wasn't like being haunted, or what he imagined being haunted would be like; this was like being stoned on bad, cheap dope.

Sasuke did this. Sasuke hypnotized you, but you're going to break out of it. You're going to spend the goddamned night in this room, and not just because it's the best location you've ever been in-leave out Sasuke and you've got damned near enough for the ghost story of the decade already-but because Sasuke doesn't get to win. Him and his bullshit story about how thirty people have died in here, they don't get to win. I'm the one in charge of bullshit around here, so just breathe in... and out. Breathe in... and out. In... and out...

He went on like that for nearly ninety seconds, and when he opened his eyes again, he felt normal. The pictures on the wall? Still straight. Fruit in the bowl? Still yellow-orange and uglier than ever. Desert fruit for sure. Eat one piece of that and you'd shit until it hurt.

He pushed RECORD. The red eye went on. "I had a little vertigo for a minute or two," he said, crossing the room to the writing desk and the window with its protective mesh outside. "It might have been a hangover from Sasuke's yarning, but I could believe I feel a genuine presence here." He felt no such thing, of course, but once that was on tape he could write almost anything he pleased. "The air is stale. Not musty or foul-smelling, Sasuke said the place gets aired every time it gets turned, but the turns are quick and... yeah... it's stale. Hey, look at this."

There was an ashtray on the writing desk, one of those little ones made of thick glass that you used to see in hotels everywhere, and in it was a book of matches. On the front was the Hotel Sharingan. In front of the hotel stood a smiling doorman in a very old-fashioned uniform, the kind with shoulder-boards, gold frogging, and a cap that looked as if it belonged in a gay bar, perched on the head of a motorcycle ramrod wearing nothing else but a few silver body-rings. Going back and forth on Fifth Avenue in front of the hotel were cars from another era-Packards and Hudsons, Studebakers and finny Chrysler Konahers.

"The matchbook in the ashtray looks like it comes from about 1955," Naruto said, and slipped it into the pocket of his lucky Hawaiian shirt. "I'm keeping it as a souvenir. Now it's time for a little fresh air."

There is a clunk as he sets the minicorder down, presumably on the writing desk. There is a pause followed by vague sounds and a couple of effortful grunts. After these come a second pause and then a squeaking sound. "Success!" he says. This is a little off-Naruto, but the follow-up is closer.

"Success!" Naruto repeated, picking the minicorder up off the desk. "The bottom half wouldn't budge... it's like it's nailed shut... but the top half came down all right. I can hear the traffic on Fifth Avenue, and all the beeping horns have a comforting quality. Someone is playing a saxophone, perhaps in front of the Plaza, which is across the street and two blocks down. It reminds me of my brother."

Naruto stopped abruptly, looking at the little red eye. It seemed to accuse him. Brother? His brother was dead, another fallen soldier in the tobacco wars. Then he relaxed. What of it? These were the spook wars, where Michael Uzumaki-Namakazi had always come off the winner. As for Donald Uzumaki-Namakazi...

"My brother was actually eaten by wolves one winter on the Connecticut Turnpike," he said, then laughed and pushed STOP. There is more on the tape-a little more-but that is the final statement of any coherence... the final statement, that is, to which a clear meaning can be ascribed.

Naruto turned on his heels and looked at the pictures. Still hanging perfectly straight, good little pictures that they were. That still life, though-what an ugly fucking thing that was!

He pushed RECORD and spoke two words-fuming oranges-into the minicorder. Then he turned it off again and walked across the room to the door leading into the bedroom. He paused by the evening-dressed lady and reached into the darkness, feeling for the light switch. He had just one moment to register

(it feels like skin like old dead skin)

something wrong with the wallpaper under his sliding palm, and then his fingers found the switch. The bedroom was flooded with yellow light from another of those ceiling figures buried in hanging glass baubles. The bed was a double hiding under a yellow-orange coverlet.

"Why say hiding?" Naruto asked the minicorder, then pushed the STOP button again. He stepped in, fascinated by the fuming desert of the coverlet, by the tumorous bulges of the pillows beneath it. Sleep there? Not at all, sir! It would be like sleeping inside that goddam still life, sleeping in that horrible hot Paul Bowles room you couldn't quite see, a room for lunatic expatriate Englishmen who were blind from syphilis caught while fucking their mothers, the film version starring either Laurence Harvey or Jeremy Irons, one of those actors you just naturally associated with unnatural acts-

Naruto pushed RECORD, the little red eye came on, he said "Orpheus on the Orpheum Circuit!" into the Naruto, then pushed STOP again. He approached the bed. The coverlet gleamed yellow-orange. The wallpaper, perhaps cream-colored by daylight, had picked up the yellow-orange glow of the coverlet. There was a little night-table to either side of the bed. One was a telephone-black and large and equipped with a dial. The finger-holes in the dial looked like surprised white eyes. On the other tale was a dish with a plum on it. Naruto pushed RECORD and said: "That isn't a real plum. That's a plastic plum." He pushed STOP again.

On the bed itself was a doorknob menu. Naruto sidled up one side of the bed, being quite careful to touch neither the bed nor the wall, and picked the menu up. He tried not to touch the coverlet, either, but the tips of his fingers brushed it and he moaned. It was soft and terrible in some wrong way. Nevertheless, he picked the menu up. It was in French, and although it had been years since he had taken the language, one of the breakfast items appeared to be birds roasted in shit. That at least sounds like something the French might eat, he thought, and uttered a wild, distracted laugh.

He closed his eyes and opened them.

The menu was in Russian.

He closed his eyes and opened them.

The menu was in Italian.

Closed his eyes, opened them.

There was no menu. There was a picture of a screaming little woodcut boy looking back over his shoulder at the woodcut wolf which had swallowed his left leg up to the knee. The wolf's ears were laid back and he looked like a terrier with its favorite toy.

I don't see that, Naruto thought, and of course he didn't. Without closing his eyes he saw neat lines of English, each line listing a different breakfast temptation. Eggs, waffles, fresh berries; no birds roasted in shit. Still-

He turned around and very slowly edged himself out of the little space between the wall and the bed, a space that now felt as narrow as a grave. His heart was beating so hard that he could feel it in his neck and wrists as well as in his chest. His eyes were throbbing in their sockets. 1408 was wrong, yes indeed, 1408 was very wrong. Sasuke had said something about poison gas, and that was what Naruto felt like: someone who has been gassed or forced to smoke strong hashish laced with insect poison. Sasuke had done this, of course, probably with the active laughing connivance of the security people. Pumped his special poison gas up through the vents. Just because he could see no vents didn't mean the vents weren't there.

Naruto looked around the bedroom with wide, frightened eyes. There was no plum on the endtable to the left of the bed. No plate, either. The table was bare. He turned, started for the door leading back to the sitting room, and stopped. There was a picture on the wall. He couldn't be absolutely sure-in his present state he couldn't be absolutely sure of his own name-but he was fairly sure that there had been no picture there when he first came in. It was a still life. A single plum sat on a tin plate in the middle of an old plank table. The light falling across the plum and the plate was a feverish yellow-orange.

Tango-light, he thought. The kind of light that makes the dead get up out of their graves and tango. The kind of light-

"I have to get out of here," he whispered, and blundered back into the sitting room. He became aware that his shoes had begun to make odd smooching sounds, as if the floor beneath them were growing soft.

The pictures on the living room wall were crooked again, and there were other changes, as well. The lady on the stairs had pulled down the top of her gown, baring her breasts. She held one in each hand. A drop of blood hung from each nipple. She was staring directly into Naruto's eyes and grinning ferociously. Her teeth were filed to cannibal points. At the rail of the sailing ship, the tars had been replaced by a line of pallid men and women. The man on the far left, nearest the ship's bow, wore a brown wool suit and held a derby hat in one hand. His hair was slicked to his brow and parted in the middle. His face was shocked and vacant. Naruto knew his name: Kevin O'Malley, this room's first occupant, a sewing machine salesman who had jumped from this room in October of 1910. To O'Malley's left were the others who had died here, all with that same vacant, shocked expression. It made them look related, all members of the same inbred and cataclysmically retarded family.

In the picture where the fruit had been, there was now a severed human head. Yellow-orange light swam off the sunken cheeks, the sagging lips, the upturned, glazing eyes, the cigarette parked behind the right ear.

Naruto blundered toward the door, his feet smooching and now actually seeming to stick a little at each step. The door wouldn't open, of course. The chain hung unengaged, the thumbbolt stood straight up like clock hands pointing to six o'clock, but the door wouldn't open.

Breathing rapidly, Naruto turned from it and waded-that was what it felt like-across the room to the writing desk. He could see the curtains beside the window he had cracked open waving desultorily, but he could feel no fresh air against his face. It was as though the room were swallowing it. He could still hear horns on Fifth, but they were now so very distant. Did he still hear the saxophone? If so, the room had stolen its sweetness and melody and left only an atonal reedy drone, like the wind blowing across a hole in a dead man's neck or a pop bottle filled with severed fingers or-

Stop it, he tried to say, but he could no longer speak. His heart was hammering at a terrible pace; if it went much faster, it would explode. His minicorder, faithful companion of many "case expeditions," was no longer in his hand. He had left it somewhere. In the bedroom? If it was in the bedroom, it was probably gone by now, swallowed by the room; when it was digested, it would be excreted into one of the pictures.

Gasping for breath like a runner nearing the end of a long race, Naruto put a hand to his chest, as if to soothe his heart. what he felt in the left breast pocket of his gaudy shirt was the small square shape of the minicorder. The feel of it, so solid and known, steadied him a little-brought him back a little. He became aware that he was humming... and that the room seemed to be humming back at him, as if myriad mouths were concealed beneath its smoothly nasty wallpaper. He was aware that his stomach was now so nauseated that it seemed to be swinging in its own greasy hammock. He could feel the air crowding against his ears in soft, coagulating clots, and it made him think of how fudge was when it reached the soft-ball stage.

But he was back a little, enough to be positive of one thing: he had to call for help while there was still time. The thought of Sasuke smirking (in his deferential Konah hotel manager way) and saying I told you so didn't bother him, and the idea that Sasuke had somehow induced these strange perceptions and horrible fear by chemical means had entirely left his mind. It was the room. It was the goddamned room.

He meant to jab out a hand to the old-fashioned telephone-the twin of the one in the bedroom-and snatch it up. Instead he watched his arm descend to the table in a kind of delirious slow motion, so like the arm of a diver he almost expected to see bubbles rising from it.

He closed his fingers around the handset and picked it up. His other hand dove, as deliberate as the first, and dialed 0. As he put the handset of the phone against his ear, he heard a series of clicks as the dial spun back to its original position. It sounded like the wheel on Wheel of Fortune, do you want to spin or do you want to solve the puzzle? Remember that if you try to solve the puzzle and fail, you will be put out into the snow beside the Connecticut Turnpike and the wolves will eat you.

There was no ring in his ear. Instead, a harsh voice simply began speaking. "This is nine! Nine! This is nine! Nine! This is ten! Ten! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead! This is six! Six!"

Naruto listened with growing horror, not at what the voice was saying but at its rasping emptiness. It was not a machine-generated voice, but it wasn't a human voice, either. It was the voice of the room. The presence pouring out of the walls and the floor, the presence speaking to him from the telephone, had nothing in common with any haunting or paranormal event he had ever read about. There was something alien here.

No, not here yet... but coming. It's hungry, and you're dinner.

The phone fell from his relaxing fingers and he turned around. It swung at the end of its cord the way his stomach was swinging back and forth inside him, and he could still hear that voice rasping out of the black: "Eighteen! This is now eighteen! Take cover when the siren sounds! This is four! Four!"

He was not aware of taking the cigarette from behind his ear and putting it in his mouth, or of fumbling the book of matches with the old-fashioned gold-frogged doorman on it out of his bright shirt's right breast pocket, not aware that, after nine years, he had finally decided to have a smoke.

Before him, the room had begun to melt.

It was sagging out of its right angles and straight lines, not into curves but into strange Moorish arcs that hurt his eyes. The glass chandelier in the center of the ceiling began to sag like a thick glob of spit. The pictures began to bend, turning into shapes like the windshields of old cars. From behind the glass of the picture by the door leading into the bedroom, the twenties woman with the bleeding nipples and grinning cannibal-teeth whirled around and ran back up the stairs, going with the jerky delirious high knee-pistoning of a vamp in a silent movie. The telephone continued to grind and spit, the voice coming from it now the voice of an electric hair-clipper that has learned how to talk: "Five! This is five! Ignore the siren! Even if you leave this room, you can never leave this room! Eight! This is eight!"

The door to the bedroom and the door to the hall had begun to collapse downward, widening in the middle and becoming doorways for beings possessed of unhallowed shapes. The light began to grow bright and hot, filling the room with that yellow-orange glow. Now he could see rips in the wallpaper, black pores that quickly grew to become mouths. The floor sank into a concave arc and now he could hear it coming, the dweller in the room behind the room, the thing in the walls, the owner of the buzzing voice. "Six!" the phone screamed. "Six, this is goddam fucking SIX!"

He looked down at the matchbook in his hand, the one he had plucked out of the bedroom ashtray. Funny old doorman, funny old cars with their big chrome grilles... and words running across the bottom that he hadn't seen in a long time, because now the strip of abrasive stuff was always on the back.

CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING.

Without thinking about it-he no longer could think-Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi tore out a single match, allowing the cigarette to drop out of his mouth at the same time. He struck the match and immediately touched it to the others in the book. There was a ffffhut! sound, a strong whiff of burning sulfur that went into his head like a whiff of smelling salts, and a bright flare of matchheads. And again, without so much as a single thought, Naruto held the flaring bouquet of fire against the front of his shirt. It was a cheap thing made in Korea or Cambodia or Borneo, old now; it caught fire at once. Before the flames could blaze up in front of his eyes, rendering the room once more unstable, Naruto saw it clearly, like a man who has awakened from a nightmare only to find the nightmare all around him.

His head was clear-the strong whiff of sulfur and the sudden rising heat from his shirt had done that much-but the room maintained its insanely Moorish aspect. Moorish was wrong, not even very close, but it was the only word that seemed even to reach toward what had happened here... what was still happening. He was in a melting, rotting cave full of swoops and mad tilts. The door to the bedroom had become the door to some sarcophagal inner chamber. And to his left, where the picture of the fruit had been, the wall was bulging outward toward him, splitting open in those long cracks that gaped like mouths, opening on a world from which something was now approaching. Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi could hear its slobbering, avid breath, and smell something alive and dangerous. It smelled a little like the lion-house in the-

The flames scorched the undershelf of his chin, banishing thought. The heat rising from his blazing shirt put that waver back into the world, and as he began to smell the crispy aroma of his chest-hair starting to fry, Naruto again bolted across the sagging rug to the hall door. An insectile buzzing sound had begun to sweat out of the walls. The yellow-orange light was steadily brightening, as if a hand were turning up an invisible rheostat. But this time when he reached the door and turned the knob, the door opened. It was as if the thing behind the bulging wall had no use for a burning man; did not, perhaps, relish cooked meat.

III

A popular song from the fifties suggests that love makes the world go 'round, but coincidence would probably be a better bet. Rufus Dearborn, who was staying that night in room 1414, up near the elevators, was a salesman for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, in town from Texas to talk about moving up to an executive position. And so it happened that, ninety or so years after room 1408's first occupant jumped to his death, another sewing machine salesman saved the life of the man who had come to write about the purportedly haunted room. Or perhaps that is an exaggeration; Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi might have lived even if no one-especially a fellow on his way back from a visit to the ice machine-had been in the hallway at that moment. Having your shirt catch fire is no joke, though, and he certainly would have been burned much more severely and extensively if not for Dearborn, who thought fast and moved even faster.

Not that Dearborn ever remembered exactly what happened. He constructed a coherent enough story for the newspapers and TV cameras (he liked the idea of being a hero very much, and it certainly did no harm to his executive aspirations), and he clearly remembered seeing the man on fire lunge out into the hall, but after that everything was a blur. Thinking about it was like trying to reconstruct the things you had done during the vilest, deepest drunk of your life.

One thing he was sure of but didn't tell any of the reporters, because it made no sense: the burning man's scream seemed to grow in volume, as if he were a stereo that was being turned up. He was right there in front of Dearborn, and the pitch of the scream never changed, but the volume most certainly did. It was as if the man were some incredibly loud object that was just arriving here.

Dearborn ran down the hall with the full ice-bucket in his hand. The burning man-"It was just his shirt on fire, I saw that right away," he told the reporters-struck the door opposite the room he had come out of, rebounded, staggered, and fell to his knees. That was when Dearborn reached him. He put his foot on the burning shoulder of the screaming man's shirt and pushed him over onto the hall carpet. Then he dumped the contents of the ice-bucket onto him.

These things were blurred in his memory, but accessible. He was aware that the burning shirt seemed to be casting far too much light-a sweltering yellow-orange light that made him think of a trip he and his brother had made to Australia two years before. They had rented an all-wheel drive and had taken off across the Great Australian Desert (the few natives called it the Great Australian Bugger-All, the Dearborn brothers discovered), a hell of a trip, great, but spooky. Especially the big rock in the middle, Ayers Rock. They had reached it right around sunset and the light on its man faces was like this... hot and strange... not really what you thought of as earthlight at all...

He dropped beside the burning man who was now only the smoldering man, the covered-with-ice-cubes man, and rolled him over to stifle the flames reaching around to the back of the shirt. When he did, he saw the skin on the left side of the man's neck had gone a smoky, bubbly red, and the lobe of his ear on that side had melted a little, but otherwise... otherwise...

Dearborn looked up, and it seemed-this was crazy, but it seemed the door to the room the man had come out of was filled with the burning light of an Australian sundown, the hot light of an empty place where things no man had ever seen might live. It was terrible, that light (and the low buzzing, like an electric clipper that was trying desperately to speak), but it was fascinating, too. He wanted to go into it. He wanted to see what was behind it.

Perhaps Naruto saved Dearborn's life, as well. He was certainly aware that Dearborn was getting up-as if Naruto no longer held any interest for him-and that his face was filled with the blazing, pulsing light coming out of 1408. He remembered this better than Dearborn later did himself, but of course Rufe Dearborn had not been reduced to setting himself on fire in order to survive.

Naruto grabbed the cuff of Dearborn's slacks. "Don't go in there," he said in a cracked, smoky voice. "You'll never come out."

Dearborn stopped, looking down at the reddening, blistering face of the man on the carpet.

"It's haunted," Naruto said, and as if the words had been a talisman, the door of room 1408 slammed furiously shut, cutting off the light, cutting off the terrible buzz that was almost words.

Rufus Dearborn, one of Singer Sewing Machine's finest, ran down to the elevators and pulled the fire alarm.

IV

There's an interesting picture of Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi in Treating the Burn Victim: A Diagnostic Approach, the sixteenth edition of which appeared about sixteen months after Naruto's short stay in room 1408 of the Hotel Sharingan. The photo shows just his torso, but it's Naruto, all right. One can tell by the white square on the left side of his chest. The flesh all around it is an angry red, actually blistered into second-degree burns in some places. The white square marks the left breast pocket of the shirt he was wearing that night, the lucky shirt with his minicorder in the pocket.

The minicorder itself melted around the corners, but it still works, and the tape inside it was fine. It's the things on it which are not fine. After listening to it three or four times, Naruto's agent, Sam Farrell, tossed it into his wall-safe, refusing to acknowledge the gooseflesh all over his tanned, scrawny arms. In that wall-safe the tape has stayed ever since. Farrell has no urge to take it out and play it again, not for himself, not for his curious friends, some of whom would cheerfully kill to hear it; Konah publishing is a small community, and word gets around.

He doesn't like Naruto's voice on the tape, he doesn't like the stuff that voice is saying (My brother was eaten by wolves one winter on the Connecticut Turnpike... what in God's name is that supposed to mean?), and most of all he doesn't like the background sounds on the tape, a kind of liquid smooshing that sometimes sounds like clothes churning around in an oversudsed washer, sometimes like one of those old electric hair-clippers... and sometimes weirdly like a voice.

While Naruto was still in the hospital, a man named Sasuke-the manager of the goddamned hotel, if you please-came and asked Sam Farrell if he could listen to that tape. Farrell said no, he couldn't; what Sasuke could do was take himself on out of the agent's office at a rapid hike and thank God all the way back to the fleabag where he worked that Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi had decided not to sue either the hotel or Sasuke for negligence.

"I tried to persuade him not to go in," Sasuke said quietly. A man who spent most of his working days listening to tired travelers and petulant guests bitch about everything from their rooms to the magazine selection in the newsstand, he wasn't much perturbed by Farrell's rancor. "I tried everything in my power. If anyone was negligent that night, Mr. Farrell, it was your client. He believed too much in nothing. Very unwise behavior. Very unsafe behavior. I would guess he has changed somewhat in that regard."

In spite of Farrell's distaste for the tape, he would like Naruto to listen to it, acknowledge it, perhaps use it as a pad from which to launch a new book. There is a book in what happened to Naruto, Farrell knows it-not just a chapter, a forty-page case history, but an entire book. One that might outsell all three of the Ten Nights books combined. And of course he doesn't believe Naruto's assertion that he has finished not only with ghost-tales but with all writing. Writers say that from time to time, that's all. The occasional prima donna outburst is part of what makes writers in the first place.

As for Naruto Uzumaki-Namakazi himself, he got off lucky, all things considered. And he knows it. He could have been burned much more badly than he actually was; if not for Mr. Dearborn and his bucket of ice, he might have had twenty or even thirty different skin-graft procedures to suffer through instead of only four. His neck is scarred on the left side in spite of the grafts, but the doctors at the Boston Burn Institute tell him the scares will fade on their own. He also knows that the burns, painful as they were in the weeks and months after that night, were necessary. If not for the matches with CLOSE COVER BEFORE STRIKING written on the front, he would have died in 1408, and his end would have been unspeakable. To a coroner it might have looked like a stroke or a heart attack, but the actual cause of death would have been much nastier.

Much nastier.

He was also lucky in having produced three popular books on ghosts and hauntings before actually running afoul of a place that is haunted-this he also knows. Sam Farrell may not believe Naruto's life as a writer is over, but Sam doesn't need to; Naruto knows it for both of them. He cannot so much as write a postcard without feeling cold all over his skin and being nauseated deep in the pit of his belly. Sometimes just looking at a pen (or a tape recorder) will make him think: The pictures were crooked. I tried to straighten the pictures. He doesn't know what this means. He can't remember the pictures or anything else from room 1408, and he is glad. That is a mercy. His blood-pressure isn't so good these days (his doctor told him that burn victims often develop problems with their blood-pressure and put him on medication), his eyes trouble him (his ophthalmologist told him to start taking Ocuvites), he has consistent back problems, his prostate has gotten too large... but he can deal with these things. He knows he isn't the first person to escape 1408 without really escaping-Sasuke tried to tell him-but it isn't all bad. At least he doesn't remember. Sometimes he has nightmares, quite often, in fact (almost every goddam night, in fact), but he rarely remembers them when he wakes up. A sense that things are rounding off at the corners, mostly-melting the way the corners of his minicorder melted. He lives on Long Island these days, and when the weather is good he takes long walks on the beach. The closest he has ever come to articulating what he does remember about his seventy-odd (very odd) minutes in 1408 was on one of those walks. "It was never human," he told the incoming waves in a choked, halting voice. "Ghost... at least ghosts were once human. The thing in the wall, though... that thing..."

Time may improve it, he can and does hope for that. Time may fade it, as it will fade the scars on his neck. In the meantime, thought, he sleeps with the lights on in his bedroom, so he will know at once where he is when he wakes up from the bad dreams. He has had all the phones taken out of the house; at some point just below the place where his conscious mind seems able to go, he is afraid of picking the phone up and hearing a buzzing, inhuman voice spit, "This is nine! Nine! We have killed your friends! Every friend is now dead!"

And when the sun goes down on clear evenings, he pulls every shade and blind and drape in the house. He sits like a man in a darkroom until his watch tells him the light-even the last fading glow along the horizon-must be gone.

He can't stand the light that comes at sunset.

That yellow deepening to orange, like light in the Australian desert.


	3. behind closed door's

As a young boy laid in his bed week and wery unable to sleep. As he looked around in his room it was holding a feeling of emptyness as all that resided in the room was a bed and a closet even for a younge boy his age you would have expected to see at least one toy around the room but it was clean as a whistle it wasnt right as he tried to go back to sleep he heard noises it was almost creaking from a bed but it wasnt it was the sound of the door infront of him it opened slightly as moved his hand gripping the blanket cover's tighter as he shacked fear came over him as he looked he was about to scream for help and as he was ready to scream he was interupted by the door leading to the hallway slamming open wide and as it slammed into the wall.

Naruto was even more scared as he knew who it was he looked at his closet again as he saw it was closed again he couldn't help but sigh with realif when he looked seeing the man infront of him it was his father the great 4th hokage as he was told he stood over the door his eye's blood shot like he had came home from lack of sleep but in his hand was a bottle of sake, Naruto knew what was wrong his father had been drinking and he knew he was afraid as he was thinking he heard his father say in a drunken accent,

"Boy why are you awake go to sleep now damnit or ill knock you out and stay quiet!" as he looked at his sun he had a look of a demon. Naruto responded to his father with a stutter.

"T-t-their's a-a-a m-monster in my c-closet." he hoped his father would at least look in their like a father should for their son's. but all his father looked at him and laughed,

"stop lieing brat there is no such thing as a monster no GO TO SLEEP!" he slammed the door hard as he moved away from the room Naruto could hear his mothing screaming and the sound of her fear as she said,

"Minato please calm down ok you had a long day go to bed." a smack came and naruto was in fear again but he sighed as it seemed to be the same thing night after night since the day he was able to remember anything. he then heard a voice from the closet saying to him.

"he lie's their are monster boy free me. free me FREE ME!" Naruto looked seeing the closet opened up again as he did the only thing that he was able to do place the cover over his head and shack while hearing the sound of his more being beaten and the monster in the closet haunt him.

It was closer to the thirteenth hour before he finally had perfect silence before he was able to sleep. But he was still unhappy in his dream's he would look to see his fears follow him the monster he saw in the closet and the man everone called a hero.

Day's later as he was ready to go to bed he was alone again his mother sitting in the living room and his father unknown probubly drinking as Naruto walked into the room he was hearing the pounding in his closet he was about to run under the blanket when he heard what his godfather had told him,

"Naruto your a good man and sometime you need to stand up to the thing you fear no matter who or what it is got it." Naruto wonder what he ment but simple walked over to the closet his heat raising harder and faster like it was about to burst out of his chest he slowly opened the closet and saw nothing absolutly nothing. Naruto smiled some as he looking in it.

He heard the voice even though he didnt he see anyone.

"Naruto let me out Naruto let me out."

Naruto closed the door as he did he let out a look of releif then he turned his head and saw something that scared him it was a boy almost like him but his face was deformed like a skulls face pure black like brimstone like a demons with his theeth filed like a fang each one as sharp as a kuni then the eyes they were slitted in the center where the iris was and was red as blood. Naruto jumped and ran out of the room as he looked seeing his mother fall down out of the door unconious.

He was scared having nothing help him now. he then looked seeing his father and them eyes like his he hated his eye's when he looked in the mirror all he would see was his eyes they were nothing but a curse he wished he could just change them. His father looked at him again but not just a drunk look on him but a look to kill and he was the target was Naruto himself his father said in a drunken rage,

"Why arnt you in bed boy now you need to be punished." he set his hand in a fist as naruto know he would be beaten and did what only he could do, Naruto ran hard and fast into his bed room as he looked trying to find a place to hid he moved over to the closet he knew that monster was in their but he figure he would be more safer with that thing then anything. he moved in closing himself hoping that his father wouldnt find him.

Minato walked in the room as he slammed it open almost breaking the door open as he said,

"Come here naruto daddy wants a little talk." he looked seeing that naruto was alone but heard a noise in the closet he turned his head giving a wicked smile as he walked over slamming the closet open and he saw his son crounch into a ball he then said to him,

"Well boy get up so you get what you diserve!" as naruto did minato eyes turn wide as what he saw didnt look like naruto it was a thing beyond the world he moved backward sweating hard as he wanted to yell but then the thing jumps at him bitting his neck slashing it as he sat down dieing he looked at the creature and said,

"You. Your a monster!" and all the thing said in return,

"But daddy you said there are no monster's." and moves his head over ripping the neck and ending minato life. Soon the face changed and the thing looked like naruto again his mouth covered in blood as he heard his mother as she manage to wake up he ran to her as he heard her cry as he huged her he said to his mother.

"Mom dont worry were safe no one will hurt you."

As Naruto said that his eyes turned black almost like a demon's that was sleeping dreamly and gave a smile that showed his sharp fangs.


	4. Nevermore

_**Got bored and tired so heres a new chapter.**_

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary. I was reading through old classic favorites of mine. I was alone in my library. I had to keep pushing my long, cherry red hair out of my face. My parents were away for the night and they simply expected me to be a "good girl". I had no friends so there was nobody to party with. So i simply retreated to the library.

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,  
As of some ne gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.  
"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door -  
Only this, and nothing more." I ignored it. It might have simply been one of the maids or someone else. I returned to my book.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December. The number of days dwindling til the date of my 17th birthday. I expected nothing special. My parents had already purchased me a car. I asked for nothing but they always gave me something. All I wanted in life was a black dress, a wonderful man, and a good book. The tapping continued.

"Sir," said I, "or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;  
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,  
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,  
That I scarce was sure I heard you"- here I opened wide the door;  
Darkness there, and nothing more.  
"How odd," I mused to myself.

"My mind is surely playing tricks on me" i spoke to the air as I returned to my book. I was soon lost in a fantasy of darkness of the night. Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.  
"Surely," said I, "surely that is something at my window lattice:  
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore -  
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; -  
'Tis the wind and nothing more."

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,  
In there stepped a stately Naruto of the saintly days of yore. I began laughing at myself. I had been frightened of a bird of darkness. A bird as dark as my heart, nails, clothes and eyes.

"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no cNaruto, Ghastly grim and ancient Naruto wandering from the Nightly shore - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!" The Naruto flutted about once more and landed in my chair. Before my very eyes it began to transform. And in a flash of blinding light there sat a man. The most handsome man I had ever lay eyes on.

He had black hair that was spiked in the front. His eyes were a crimson red. His skin was pale and flawless. He wore no shirt, revealing a smooth, tatooed, chest. The only clothing he wore were tight black jeans. He had a slight smirk on his face. He spoke in a British accent.

"Naruto" His voice was melodic, like velvet dragging across my ears. It shook me from one trance but drove me into another.

"I'm sorry?"

"You asked of my name. Naruto. Tis not my true name. My true name is my form, Naruto. Naruto is simply what i'm called. And what of you? What is the name by which you are called?" I felt myself falling under his spell. He slowly started moving to me. He stood at nearly 6'0 while i was only 5'0'. His eyes were ablaze with lust. He wanted me in a way that was inhuman. I finally found my voice and a single word left my lips.

"Hinata."

"Hinata." He repeated it. He smiled at me, and for a moment I thought his face became a school almost that of them forms in picture of death. A gasp escaped my lips.

"You're a...a..." I could not even finish my sentence.

"Demon"." He finished.

"Yes, i am. And I have been search for the last 5,000 years for a girl or no a woman to call my lover. And now, i finally have." He wrapped one arm around my waist and reached down and pressed his lips firmly against mine. His touch was like ice. I was reluctant. I didn't want to give into him but something inside told me to. He pulled away, giving me that demonic smirk.

"Well? What do you say? Will you be mine?" I pulled myself away and turned away from him.

"I don't know. I'm only 16. I have a whole life ahead of me." He moved over to me and wrapped his arms around my waist. He whispered in my ear and a shiver went through my spine.

"And who's to say you can't have that life? After the first 5 years of transformation, you continue to grow like a human. You have to be careful of the living as the power can kill even the healthiest of people. We never die so we can spend eternity together. You can change into the form of your choosing. And the passion and romance between two Deaths is greater than any human. The two are bonded right down to their very thoughts and feelings." Being there, listening to every word. I began to desire it more and more. He tilted my head to the the side and brushed away my hair using one finger. He began placing gentile kisses on my neck. Each one sending electricty through my veins. I could feel my heart pounding against my chest.

"So?" I wanted to say no so badly, but like Eve in the Garden of Eden, I was too tempted and bit the apple. I took in a breath and felt the word leave my lips.

"Yes, i will be yours. Forever and always." As quickly as the words left my lips, I felt him nip at my neck but could feel his teeth like a fang slip painlessly into my vein. I felt the blood leaving me and one drop trickled down my chest. But as I felt the life leaving me, i felt a new life entering me. After a few moments of drinking from me, he pulled away. When he did, i felt a fire coursing through my veins. It burned yet felt so wonderful at the same time.

"Don't worry, it may hurt a little but only slightly. Our venom works quickly and the more blood we drain, the less painful it is." He took a blade from a nearby taable and made a slight incision on his wrist and raised it to my lips.

"Here, drink. This will also make the venom work faster and it will bind the two of us together. And it will sustain you until we can hunt." I brought the cut right to my lips amd began drinking in. His blood tasted so savory yet at the same time, so sweet. After letting me drink a few moments, he pulled away. I felt so weak. I started falling and he caught me in his arms. The last thing I saw before I lost conciousness was the bright light of the moon.

I awoke in a few hours later in a bed that was not my own. I had no idea where I was but what i knew is I was being watched. I sat up in the bed and turned and saw Naruto sitting in a chair watching me.

"Good, you're awake. Let me quickly explain, you have been asleep for an entire day. That's completely normal for a transformation but it's why I wanted to make sure you had some blood. You're here at my, well now our, home in London. When you passed out I found your room and packed up some of your clothes." He gestured towards a couple bags in the corner. He stood up from his chair and he moved closer to me. He carressed my cheek with his hand. His icy touch was no longer gone.

"We are the same." He smiled. He then moved his lips into mine and kissed me ever so gently. He probed his tounge against my lips and I opened to him. He moved his tounge into my mouth and his tounge began exploring every corner of my mouth. I moaned into his mouth as I moved my hands to the back of his head. He bit down gently on my lip and I could taste blood. He moved his tongue to my lip and began licking the bitemark. It was the most erotic feeling. He pulled away and I let out a moan of protest.

"Do you feel week at all?" I realized I was feeling a little woozy.

"Yeah, a little." He raised his wrist to my lips.

"Here, drink. You'll feel better." I raised my eyes to his.

"Don't worry, i'll be fine." So reluctantly I bit down on his artery and began drinking. His blood flowed into my mouth. I remembered how good it had tasted the first time we met but now, it was just heavenly. I drank for about 30 seconds before he gently pulled away.

"Now how do you feel?" He said, his eyes full of caring.

"Much better, thank you."

"My pleasure." But now that my hunger was gone, i felt a surge of lust within me. As I sat there admiring his beautiful body, i just wanted him. I removed my top and gave him my most seductive glance. He got the hint quickly as he was already removing his jeans and boxers. Below them was a not even erect 6 inch long, 2 inch thick cock. I slowly moved my hand to it and began stroking it into hardness. A sound half between a moan and growl left Naruto's lips. He soon moved himself onto the bed and reached around to my back. He unclasped my bra and threw it across the room. My boobs were a D-cup but they were still firm and perky. My nipples were hard as diamonds and begging to be touched. I lay back on the bed and he moved one hand to my right breast which he began kneading. He then moved his ither hand to my left nipple which be pinched, making me gasp in pain and pleasure. He gazed into my eyes and stood up and removed my skirt and panties and they joined my bra on the floor. I lay there completely exposed and willing for him. He lay back on top of me and posistioned his tip at the enterance of my pussy. I could feel how wet I was. He started rubbing up and down my slit and every time he hit my clit I gasped.

"Oh Naruto, please don't keep me waiting any longer. I need you so much." He smirked and began pushing into me until he hit that precious barrier. He looked right into my eyes and he spoke in a calming voice.

"This will hurt but only for a second." I was in such a state of mixed bliss and pain i would've done whatever he said. He gave a hard thrust in me and I felt my hymen tear. I cried out but the pain subsided. He continued thrusting into me. It hurt but at the same time I never wanted it to stop.

"Oh Naruto, yes! Yes! Harder please!" He didn't need me to tell him twice. He began pounding me relentlessly. His thick cock stretching my sheath with every thrust. I wrapped my legs around his waist, allowing him further, deeper, penetrations. I moved my hand down and began rubbing my clit furiously. I could feel myself getting closer and closer. I finally felt him hit my g-spot.

"Oh Naruto! Oh!" And i felt my pussy clench around his dick as I climaxed.

"Oh Hinata !" He cried out, throwing his head back. I felt him shoot his cum deep within me. He collapsed against me and we lay there a few moments. He then eased himself from me and I let out a whimper. He collapse beside me. I could tell I was bleeding but at the second, I didn't care. He slowly started kneading my breast again. I rolled over and looked into his deep eyes. All I say was love and caring.

"Come my love, the hour of the living is approaches." He scooped me up in his arms and carried me through our new home together and then down some stone steps. There was a stone chamber and in the center of the chamber was a black coffin. The cushion inside was red velvety. He laid me down first and then climbed in with me, closing the lid behind him. He wrapped me in his arms and I snuggled against his chest. I felt so safe and secure.  
Before i fell asleep I whisped to him,

"Will you ever leave me?" And he gave me his answer.

Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."


	5. The true reason for the attack

Crazy reason itachi might have killed the clan, but we may never know (we know but this is comedy mode.)  
The true reason Itachi killed his clan

It was a calm after noon as the young Uchiha was sitting down eating a relaxing bowel of Ramen a food he rather enjoyed. His hand roaming down as he was slowly getting a bite of the rich food, He roamed more as he tasted the sweet sultry fill when suddenly.

"ITACHI I NEED YOUR HELP!" it was his mother right then at the time he was soon getting ready to head out there as he saw his father sitting there he looked rather hungry right then at the time as he soon said to him,

"Don't touch my food dad."

"I wont I promise itachi."

"I'm warning you." his father nodded right then as Itachi left right then for the moment.

the older man sat there right then thinking wondering as he said, "Fuck it i will get my own." and left the room right then as no one looked as he ready making his own.

What none of them knew right at the time was a blonde hair child ran through almost for his life but stoped seeing the bowel he gave a fox like smile as he turned his head right then making sure no one saw him.

and soon with that he took the raman bowl, as he ran off without a trace.

During the time Itachi father moved back in with his own bowl and sat right there at the time as he was eating when Itachi walked back inside and Itachi looked at him.

"What?!" his father asked and Itachi looked at him right then as he sat right then looking at his father,

"Nothing Father nothing at all." and as his father ate the food. Itachi got up and left the room right then.

-A few weeks later-

"W-why?!" Itachi father asked looking at his son right then as he felt the blade moving right in his heart.

"YOU ATE MY RAMEN I TOLD YOU NOT TO TOUCH IT YOU FUCKER!" and soon left his father gone dead. at the sight in his blood.


	6. ticky garra

_**Hello well if your reading this then my madness has come too a whole new level this was originally going to be Naruto but now that I had thought about it the story seemed more suitible for Gaara as he was one twisted son of a bitch and I'm giving you a quick warning when I started this warnin When I started this I misspelled Gaara name calling It Garra and Since I worked for hours I desided to just cute the damn replace because I know I would have lost my fricken MInd going throught the thing damn thing so no review about that please. now read this Non- Christmas tale. Review by order of the Nine tail fox.**_

"Ticci-Gaara"

The long road home seemed to go on and on. The road continued to outstretch in front of the vehicle endlessly.

The light that shone through the branches of the tall green trees danced across the window in random patterns, every once in a while, obnoxiously shining in your eyes.

The surrounding was full of deep green trees forming a forest around the road. The only sound was the sound of the cars engine as it traveled down the path. It was peaceful and let off a serene feeling.

Although the ride seemed like a nice one, it lacked every form of 'nice' for both passengers.

The middle-aged woman behind the steering wheel had neat short brown hair that fit her complexion quite well. She wore a green v-neck t-shirt and a pair of blue jeans. Diamond stud earrings decorated each of her ears which partially showed from behind her hair cut. She had deep green eyes which were brought out by her shirt, and the lighting seemed to make them more noticeable. There wasn't much significance to her appearance. She just looked like any 'average mother' that you'd see on TV shows and such, but one thing for sure made her differ from those 'average mothers' and that was the dark bags under her eyes.

Her facial expression was gloomy and sad, although she genuinely looked like one who smiled a lot.

She would sniffle every once in a while, and occasionally glance back in the rear-view mirror to look back at her son in the back seat, who was hunched over partially, his arms held tight around his chest, and his head pressed against the cold window.

The boy lacked any normal appearance, anyone could blandly see that something was wrong with him. His messy brown hair went in every which way, and his pale, almost gray skin was brought out by luminescent lighting. His eyes where dark, unlike his mother's and he wore a white t-shirt and scrub pants that had been provided to him by the hospital. The clothes he had worn before where so shredded and blood stained, that they weren't 'wearable' any more.

The right side of his face bared a few cuts along with his split eyebrow. His right arm was bandaged up all the way up to his shoulder, which had been shredded when his right side had hit the shattered glass.

His injuries appeared to be painful, when really he couldn't feel a thing. He never could feel a thing. That was just one of the glories about being him. One of the many challenges he had to face growing up, was growing up with the rare disease that caused him to be completely numb towards pain. Never before had he felt himself get hurt. He could have lost an arm and felt nothing. That and another major disorder he had faced, was the one that deemed him many insulting nick names in the short time he attended grade school, before he was moved to home schooling was his Tourette Syndrome, which caused him to tic and twitch in ways he couldn't control. He would crack his neck uncontrollably and twitch every once in a while. The kids would tease him and call him Ticci-Gaara and mock him with exaggerated twitching and laughing. It got so bad he turned to homeschooling. It was too hard for him to be in a common learning environment with seemingly every kid poking, or more like stabbing fun at him.

Gaara stared blankly out the window, his face was empty of any depict-able emotion, and every few minutes his shoulder, arm, or foot would twitch. Every bump that the car tires hit, made him stomach turn.

Gaara Sander was the boy's name. And the last time Toby remembered riding a car, was when it crashed.

That's all he thought about. Unconsciously replaying everything he had remembered before he blacked out, over and over again.  
Gaarahad been the lucky one, when his sister hadn't been so lucky. When the thought of his older sister came, he couldn't help but let his eyes begin to tear up. The horrible memories replayed in his mind. Her screaming that had been cut off when the front of the car was smashed in. It all went blank for a moment before Gaara opened his eyes to see his sister's body, her forehead pierced with glass shards, her hips and legs where crushed under the force of the steering wheel, her torso pushed in from the late inflated air bag. This was the last thing he had seen of his dear older sister.

The road home continued on for what seemed like forever. It took so long to get home due to his mother wanting to avoid passing the sight of the crash.

When the surrounding gave into a familiar neighborhood, they had both been more then ready to get out of the car and step back into their own home.

It was a older neighborhood, with quaint little houses all next to each other. The car drove in front of a little blue house, with white window panes.

They both quickly noticed the old vehicle that was parked in front of the house, and the familiar figure who stood out in the drive way. Gaara felt automatic anger and frustration take over him at the sight of his father. His father who wasn't there.

His mother pulled the car up into the driveway beside him before turning off the engine and preparing to step out and face her husband.

"Why is he here?" Gaara said quietly as he looked back at his mother who reached to open the car door.

"He's your father Gaara, he's here because he wants to see you," His mother responded with a monotone voice, trying to sound less shaky.

"Yet he couldn't have driven up to the hospital to see Tema before she died," Gaara narrowed his eyes out the window.

"He was drunk that night honey, he couldn't drive-"

"Yeah when is he not," Gaara pushed open the door before his mother and stumbled out onto the driveway where he met his father's gaze before looking down at his feet with a stern expression.

His mother stepped out behind him and met her husbands eyes before walking around the car.

His father opened up his arms, expecting a hug from his wife, but she walked passed him and put her arm around Toby's shoulder and influenced him to begin walking inside.

"Karura," her husband began to say under a raspy voice, "What no welcome home hug huh?"

She ignored her husbands obnoxious words and walked passed him with her son under her arm.  
"Hey, He's 16 he can walk by himself," his father began to follow them in. "He's 17," Karura glared back at him before opening the door to the house and stepping inside.

"Gaara,why don't we get you in your room to rest okay? I'll come get you when dinner is ready-" 

"No, I'm 16 I can walk by myself," Gaara said sarcastically, and glared back at his father before stumbling up the small stair case and turning into his room where he slammed the door violently.

His little room didn't have much in it. Just a small bed, a dresser, a window, and his walls had a few framed pictures of his family, back when they where a family.

Before his father became an alcoholic, and acted violently towards the rest of his family. Gaara remembered when he was arguing with his mother and he grabbed her by the hair and shoved her to the floor, and when Tema had tried to break it up, he pushed her and she hit her back on the corner of the kitchen counter. Gaara could never forgive him for what he did to his mother and sister. Never.

Gaara didn't care how much his father beat him down, he couldn't feel it anyway, what he did care about was how he intentionally hurt the only two people he cared about.

And when he waiting in the hospital, where his sister took her last few breaths, the only person who didn't rush there, was his dad.

Gaara stood by the window and looked out onto the street. He could have sworn he saw things out of the corner of his eye, but quickly blamed it on the medication he had been put on.

When dinner time had come around and his mother called up to him, Gaara came down the stairs and hesitantly sat down at the table across from his father, and in between his mother and an empty chair.

It was quiet as his parents picked at their food, but Gaara refused to eat. Instead he just watched his dad with a blank stare.

His mother caught onto his stare towards his father and elbowed him slightly. Gaara looked over at her slightly and look down at his uneaten food, in which he didn't touch.

Gaara laid in bed, he pulled his covers over his head and stared at the window. He was tired but there was no way he would fall asleep. He couldn't, there was too much to think about. He had been debating on whether or not to follow his mothers directions and forgive his father, or continue holding a grudge with his boiling hatred.

He heard his door creak open, and his mother padded into the room and sat on the bed next to him. She reached over and rubbed his back, which had been turned to her.

"I know its hard Gaara,trust me, I understand, but I promise you it will get better" she said softly.

"When is he going to leave?" Gaara said with a innocent tone in his shaky voice.

Karura let her gaze fall down to her feet. "I don't know honey, he's staying as far as I know," she replied.

Gaara didn't respond. He just continued to look forward at the wall, holding his damaged arm near his chest.

After a few minutes of silence, his mother sighed, before she leaned in to kiss his cheek and stood up to walk out of the room. "Good night," she said as she closed the door.

The hours passed slowly, and Gaara couldn't quit tossing and turning. Every time he let his imagination take over, he heard the screeching of tires, the screaming of his sister, and he could uncontrollably jerk in bed. He threw off his covers, laying on his back, he pulled his pillow over his face and cried into it. He could feel his chest rise and fall as he let out each shaky breathe as he cried. He could hear his own pitiful weeping. He would have been screaming and crying if he didn't press his pillow over his face.

After a few seconds he threw the pillow off his face as well and sat up, hunched over, holding his head and breathing roughly, tears streaming from his eyes. He couldn't help but cry. He tried to keep it in, but he couldn't help but whine and whimper as he sat there shaking. He inhaled before he stood up and walked around his bed to the window and peered out, taking deep breathes trying to calm down. He rubbed his eyes and looked out at the group of tall pine trees across the street.

He stopped suddenly, and his gaze slowly centered on something standing under the street light. He heard ringing in his ears and he couldn't look away. The figure stood beside the street light, about 2 feet shorter then it, Sandy feature giving him the look of a derange man with his pericing eyes as it was almost hypnotic to him but also scared to look. The ringing in his ears grew louder and louder each second he stared before suddenly it all went black.

The next morning Gaara woke in his bed. He felt different. He wasn't tired at all, and when he consciously woke up, it felt like he had been lying there, awake for hours. He had no thoughts flowing through his mind. He sat up slowly and stumbled over to the wall, but when he stood up he automatically felt dizzy. He stumbled to the doorway and walked down the stairs. His parents where sitting at the table, his father was in-tuned with the small TV that sat on the counter top, and his mother reading the newspaper. She quickly looked over when she felt Toby's presence looming behind her.

"Well, good morning sleepy head, you've been sleeping forever," She greeted him with hesitated smile.

Gaara slowly looked over at the clock and noticed that it was 12:30 p.m.

"I made you breakfast but it got cold, I was going to wake you, but I felt you needed sleep," her expression fell from happy to worried as her son resisted responding to her.

"Are you alright?"

Gaara stumbled over and sat by his father. He felt as if he was on idle, and had no control over his actions. He was seeing everything he did, but it didn't seem to register in his brain properly. He reached out to to his fathers arm, but his hand ended up getting slapped. His father turned to him abruptly and pushed his chair over with his foot.

"Don't touch me boy!" He yelled.

His mother stood up, "Alright knock that off! That is the last thing we need!"

The days went by, and things continued on as they where. Karura spent most of her time cleaning up the house, and her rude husband spent most of his time ordering her around. It was just how it used to be before the crash.

Gaara never really left his room. He would sit by his bed, and tremble. His mind would wonder, but his thoughts changed too fast to be remembered. He would pace around his small room like a caged animal, or stare out the window. The unhealthy cycle continued.

Karura continued to be pushed around by her husband, being way too submissive to him, and Gaara remained in his room.

Before he could think twice, he would begin to chew on his hands, tearing the flesh from his fingers. He would gnaw his hands until they bled. When his mother walked in on him while he was doing so, she reacted horribly. She rushed him downstairs and grabbed the first aid, wrapping his hands in it. She demanded that he wouldn't leave her side from then.

He isolated himself so much that he grew to hate being around others. His memory grew glitchy as well. He'd start missing memory of minutes, hours, days, and so on. He would begin talking nonsense, about things completely unrelated to conversations he would have. He'd go off about seeing things, sharks in his sink as he washed the dishes, hearing crickets in his pillows, and seeing ghosts outside his bedroom window. All the nonsense landed him in a counselors office. His mother grew too anxious about his mental health, she decided it would be good for him to talk to a professional about what he was feeling.

Karura walked Gaara into the building, holding his hand and guiding him in. She walked him up to the front desk and began talking to the lady who sat behind it.

"Mrs. Sander?"The lady asked.

"Yes that's me," Karura nodded, "We're here to see doctor Oliver, I'm here with Gaara Sander "  
"Yes, right this way," The lady stood up and lead them down a long hallway. Gaara looked at the framed artwork down the halls and tuned in to the sound of the lady's high heels on the hard wood floor.  
She opened the door to a room with a table and two chairs.  
"If we can get him to sit in here for a few minutes, I'll get the doctor," She smiled and held the door open.

Gaara stumbled into the room and sat down at the table. He looked over at his mother and the lady before the door slowly shut behind them. He looked around the room before he held up his tightly bandaged hands and began to bite at the bandages to unwrap his hands, but was interrupted as the door swung open and a young woman in a black and white spotted dress and light blonde hair stepped in, holding a clip board and a pen.

"Gaara?" she asked with a smile.

Gaara looked up at her and nodded.

"Nice to meet you Gaara, my name is Doctor Oliver." she put her hand out for him to shake but hesitantly pulled away when she noticed his bandaged hands.

"Oh," she smiled nervously before clearing her throat and sitting in the chair across the table from him.

"So I'm going to ask you a few questions, try to answer then as honestly as possible okay?" she placed her clip board down on the table. Gaaranodded slowly and held his restrained hands in his lap.

"How old are you Gaara?"

"17" he responded quietly.

She wrote that down on the paper that was clipped to the clipboard.

"What is your full name?" 

"Gaara Erin Sander."

"What is your birthday?"

"April 28th" 

"Who is your immediate family?"  
Gaara paused for a minute before answering her question, "My Mom, My Dad, and…" he stopped, "M-my sister."

"I heard about your sister dear… I'm really sorry," her expression faded into a sad, pity-filled look.

Gaara nodded.

"Do you remember anything from the crash Gaara?"

Gaara looked away from her. His mind went blank for a moment. He looked down at his lap, and in the surrounding, he heard a faint ringing sound. His eyes widened and he froze in his place.

"Gaara?" the counselor asked.

"Gaara are you listening?"

Gaara felt a shiver go down his spine until he froze once again and slowly looked over out the little window through the door, where he saw it. A dark feature-less figure, peering in at him. He stared, eyes widened, the ringing growing louder and louder until suddenly the loud voice of the counselor broke his trance.

"Gaara!" She yelled.

Gaara jumped and fell sideways out of his chair and back up into the corner.

Doctor Oliver stood up, holding her clipboard to her chest. A surprised look in her eyes.

Gaara met her eyes again, his breath hitching as he twitched.

That night Gaara laid in bed. His eyes dazed as he stared straight up at his ceiling. He could feel himself begin to doze off, when he heard the scattering of footsteps down his hallway. He sat up and looked towards the doorway, his door wide open. There was no light, everything was lit by the luminescent blue glow of the moon through his window, leaving a cold lighting. He stood up and slowly made his way towards the doorway, when suddenly the door, which was previously wide open, slammed in his face. He gasped and fell back.

His was out of breathe when he hit the ground and he began breathing heavily, his eyes wide open. He waited for a few seconds before getting back up on his feet. He reached out and grasped the cold door handle with his bandaged hand and creaked it open. He looked out into the dark hallway and tiptoed out of his room. The window at the end of the hallway lit up the darkness with blue moonlight as he padded his way down. He could hear footsteps rustling around him, and faint giggling let by the pitter patter of small feet, which sounded like a child had run in front of him, giggling and running around. The hallway was a lot longer then he had remembered. It seemed endless… like the ride home from the hospital. He heard a door creak in front of him.

"Mom?" he called out in a shaky voice.

Suddenly a door slammed behind him and he jumped and turned around. Behind him he heard a long eerie groan from behind him, that sounded to croak right in his ear. He turned around as fast as he could and was suddenly face to face with none other then his dead sister. Her eyes where clouded white, her skin pale, and the right side of her jaw only dangling on by tissue and muscle, glass protruding from her forehead, and black blood leaking down her face, her blonde hair pulled up back in a pony tail as it always was, wearing her grey t-shirt and athlete shorts which where dirty and spotted with blood. Her legs were bent in ways they shouldn't be. She stood, emitting a long croaking noise, only an inch away from Toby's face.

Gaara yelped and fell back.

"AW!" he started to crawl backwards away from her, not able to break the eye contact he held with her, blank, dead eyes. He dragged himself backwards until he backed up into something.

He stopped for a second. Everything was dead silent except for his heavy breathing and crying. He slowly looked up to meet the blank face of a tall dark figure that stood over him. Behind the tall dark mass where rows of children, looking to range from 3 to 10 years, their eyes completely black and dark black blood leaked from their eye sockets.

He screamed and stood up as fast as he could only to be tripped by dark black tendrils that wrapped around his ankle. He fell straight on his stomach and got the wind knocked out of his chest. He tried to scream out but he couldn't make a sound. He wheezed out, before it all went black.

Gaara woke up with a start. He screamed out and sat up as fast as he could, completely short of breathe. He wheezed out and held his chest with his bandaged hands. It was just a dream…. just a dream. He laid back down on his bed and rolled over on his side. It felt like a giant weight had been lifted off his chest as he took in deep breathes. He stood up and padded over to his window. He saw nothing. Nobody was out there. No ghosts. No figures. Nothing.

He heard the rustling and coughing of his father out the doorway. His door was closed.

He walked over and opened it. Looking out into the hallway once again. He padded down the hallway and into the kitchen where he found his dad standing and having a smoke in their living room.

Gaara waited a second and watched him from around the corner before a burning feeling started deep in his chest.

Deep, boiling, anger took over him. He heard the little imaginary voices in his head.

"Do it, Do it, Do it," they chanted.

He turned away and held his arms. He felt like he actually had control over himself, unlike he did for the past few weeks since he got home from the hospital. He actually had complete thoughts for just moments before they where clouded by the chanting of the little voices in his head.

"_Kill him, he wasn't there, he wasn't there, kill him, kill him," _they continued on. Gaara trembled. No. No he wasn't going to do it. What, was he going crazy? No. He won't kill anyone. He can't. He hated his father, but hated no way he was going to kill him.

That was it. The last thought he had before he fell into an idle state once again. The influence of the voices in his head was too much. He began to silently walk up behind his father. He reached over the counter to the knife holder in the kitchen and pulled out a the largest knife that had been resting in the case. He gripped it in his hand. He felt a sensation take over his chest. He let out a snicker.

"Heh… heheh… hehehehehe! HAHAHAHA!" he began laughing so hard he had to gasp for breathe. His father turned around abruptly before he felt a brute force shove him to the floor. He grunted as the hair was knocked out of him.

"What!" he looked up at the boy who stood over him, grasping the kitchen knife in his hand.

"Gaara what are you doing!" he went to sit up and put hand arms out in front of him in self defense but before he knew it Gaara was on top of him. He went to grab at his neck, but his father reached out and blocked his hand by grabbing onto this wrist.

"Stop! Get off of me you little fucker!" he yelled and with his other hand he threw an off center punch towards Toby's shoulder, but he didn't stop.

The look in Toby's eyes was not sane. It looked as if a demon had taken control over him. He yelled back and went to stab the knife into his father's chest but he blocked him and grabbed onto his wrist once again. He went to shove him back, but Gaara kicked out his feet in front of him and landed a hard blow straight to his face. His father recoiled and pulled his arms away to cuff his face, but Gaara got back up and drove the knife straight into his shoulder.  
His father let out a loud cry and went to pull the knife out, but before he could, Gaara threw his fist straight into his face.

He began to pound his fists into his head, laughing and wheezing. He cracked his neck and grabbed the knife and ripped it out of his shoulder. He drove it deep into his dad's chest and repeatedly stabbed into his torso, blood spilling out and getting splattered everywhere. He didn't stop until his father's body went still. He threw the knife over to the side and leaned over his body, coughing and panting. He stared at his smashed in face and sat there twitching, until a loud scream broke the silence. He looked over to see his mother standing a few feet away, covering her mouth, tears streaming down her eyes.

"Gaara!" she screamed, "Why did you do that!?" she cried.

"W-why!?" She screamed.  
Gaara stood up and began to back away from his father's bloody corpse. He began to back out of the kitchen. He looked down at the blood soaked bandages on his hands and looked up at his mother one last time before he turned and ran out of the house. He ran into the garage and slammed his hand against the control panel on the wall and pushed the button to open the garage door. Before he ran out his father's two hatchets that had been hanging on the tool rack above a table full of jars, filled to the brim with old rusted nails and screws.

One hatchets was new, it had a bright orange handle and a shiny blade, the other was old with a wooden handle and a old dull blade. He grabbed both and looked down at the table and his eyes met a box of matches, and under the table was a red gasoline tank. He held both of the hatchets in one hand and grabbed the matches and gasoline before running out of the garage, down the driveway and up the street. As he approached the street light that he could see out his own bedroom window he heard police sirens in to distance.

He turned around and the red and blue flashing lights came rushing down the street. Gaara stood for a second, before he pulled open the cap on the gasoline tank and ran down the street, spilling gasoline all over the street after him and he turned to run into the trees. He poured the last bit of gasoline out before he reached in his pocket and pulled out a match. He struck it against the box and immediately dropped it. In an instant, flames burst out around him. The fire caught onto the trees and bushes around him and before he knew it, he was surrounded by fire. The silhouettes of police cars where visible through the flames as he backed away into the forest around him. He looked around but his vision was blurred, his heart was pounding and he closed his eyes for a moment. This was it. This was the end.

Gaara felt a hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes and looked over to see a large white hand with long boney fingers that rested on his shoulder. He followed the arm that was attached to the hand up to a towering dark figure. It appered to have sandy blonde hair that dark look of death with a suit that covered down in snd as under it piles of sand piled under them It towered over Gaara's small frame and it looked down on him. Tendrils reached out from it's back. Before Gaara knew it, his vision blurred and he was surrounded by the sound of ringing in his ears. Everything went blank.

That was it. That was the end. That was how Gaara Sander died.

A few weeks later Karura sat in her sister's kitchen. Her sister, Lori sat next to her drinking a cup of coffee.

About three weeks ago, Karura lost her husband, and her son, and a few weeks before, she lost her daughter to a car crash. Since then she moved in with her sister. The police where keeping her busy, they had just finished cleaning up the case, and the story had been released two weeks ago, and the focus of the world seemed to have shifted to completely new stories.

Lori switched on the T.V. to a news broadcast. On the T.V. the news reporter began introducing the new headline.

"We have breaking news! Last night there has been a reported murder of 4 individuals. There are no suspects yet but the victims where a group of middle school kids who had been out in the woods late last night. The kids had been 'bludgeoned' and stabbed to death. The investigators had discovered a weapon at the crime scene which appears to be a old, dull bladed hatchet, as you can see here" The pictured changed to show snap shots of the weapon exactly as it was left on the crime scene.

"Investigators had pulled the name of a possible suspect, Gaara Sander, a 17 year old boy who a few weeks ago had stabbed his father to death and tried to cover up his escape by setting a fire in the streets and the forest area around the neighborhood. Although they had believed the young boy had died in the fire, investigators suspect that Rogers may still be alive, due to the fact that his body was never found."


End file.
